


put your awful heart to song

by Euphorion



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Accidental telepathic voyeurism, Blood, Discussions of death, Dragons, F/F, Limbo, Listen it's Krakoa all bets are off, Masturbation, Minor Emma Frost/Scott Summers, Minor Jean Grey/Scott Summers, Minor Jean Grey/Scott Summers/Logan, Minor Logan/Scott Summers, Psychic Abilities, Psychological Trauma, References to Addiction, Sexual Fantasy, Temporary Character Death, discussions of polyamory, graverobbing, inferno references, weird krakoan society stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:07:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22994431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: The unpacked belongings had been shoved to one side, revealing strange chalk markings on the floor, what looked to Emma’s amateur eye like magic sigils. In the center of the room was a metal folding chair. Rachel knelt next to it, carefully not touching the chalk, looking up at the figure sitting in it, dormant.Emma blinked. It was Jean. And also it wasn’t.It was Jean’s body. To Emma’s normal eyes, she looked like she was sleeping, her chest rising and falling peacefully, her lips slightly parted. But to Emma’s mental eye there was a coilingthingwhere her mind should be. It felt slick and sharp at once, almost oily. Emma didn't get too close.“You see the problem,” said Scott from where he stood by the door.
Relationships: Emma Frost/Jean Grey, Emma Frost/Madelyne Pryor, Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin, Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin/Rachel Summers, Kitty Pryde/Rachel Summers
Comments: 25
Kudos: 99





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during DoX, before Giant Size X-Men: Jean Grey & Emma Frost, and also before New Mutants #7, but otherwise pretty much wherever.
> 
> Didn't quite know how to tag this one! Jean dies but she's immediately resurrected but also not quite, and there's going to be a LOT of talk of all the other times she's also died. Eventually there will also be discussions of demonic possession, drug use/metaphors for drug use, canon-typical violence. Also eventual Kitty/Illyana and implied Kurt/Logan and probably maybe some other folks.
> 
> Title from Hozier's To Noise Making (Sing), which is very very much a Madelyne song for me.

For the second time in as many months, Jean Grey died.

It wasn't the most painful death she'd ever had, and far better her than the kids who'd have taken the brunt of the explosion if she hadn't thrown herself—and her insufficient TK shield—in its path. (She was too close to Leech; he was keeping an eye on the kid with the small black hole embedded in his chest where he was huddled with the rest.) They were all so young, too young to even know what they were, nevermind setting foot on Krakoa or having their minds and souls backed up in Cerebro. She'd started that process, before she died, feeding their minds through her direct link to Xavier without letting them touch her own. Now it would have to be completed without her.

She could hear Ororo yelling, far off, could feel the white-hot resolve of her mind, pushed back toward it with a pulse of love and absolute trust. That was perhaps the nicest thing about this new era of dying. The absence of doubt.

She was more experienced with death than most, though with the Five working like clockwork she imagined some people had to be catching up to her. Logan, in particular, had a penchant for being cut in half and then incinerated or whatever other genius ideas his enemies—their enemies—had come up with for getting around his healing factor. She had a thought, before the darkness claimed her, about whether that was a requirement for intimacy with Scott. _You must have been resurrected this many times to ride this ride._

She closed her eyes, and waited to open them, slimy and buzzing and new.

But she didn't. 

Someone else did.

+

Emma pushed herself back from her desk and sighed. She’d known what she was getting into, when she signed on to this whole venture. She could hardly have grown up her father’s daughter without understanding just how much bullshit paperwork was involved in running a multinational corporation—and, for that matter, monitoring a black market of your own product at the same time. And, truth be told, that was the challenge: running a business without running it like he would, without feeling his ghost peering over her shoulder at every turn.

She wondered if it would help if they dug him up. Brought him back, and just locked him away somewhere. She wasn’t sure she believed in literal ghosts, but it was hard not to at least give some credence to the concept of souls in an age when they traded them from body to body like trying on new clothes. She wondered if it would make Christian feel better or worse to have his patricide undone. 

She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to stem her oncoming headache. It wasn’t the work that was wearing on her. She was no stranger to work, despite the image she’d been carefully maintaining for years. It was the feeling that she had—stopped. That she was _staying._ She could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had felt actually, genuinely steady in her life, had believed in any real way that she could stop running. It made her feel—diffuse. Knocked apart. No longer a diamond-point drill seeking bedrock. And now that she was still, things wouldn’t stop catching up with her.

It wasn’t just her father. She caught herself absently listening to the voices of old boyfriends, people she hadn’t thought of in years. Her childhood tormentors. Her college friends. Astrid—

_Emma._

Scott’s voice cut through her musings, and she clung to it with relief. _Please tell me you need me to do something that isn’t just push papers._

 _We do._ Her relief fading, Emma could feel the worry and confusion in his mental voice. _Jean died on her last mission with Ororo, and something’s wrong._

Emma was already pulling on her gloves. _Wrong with the Five?_

 _No._ Scott hesitated. _After that. Can you meet us at the Summers House?_

Emma sent him a teasing twitch, like raising a mental eyebrow, trying to calm his nerves. _A request, captain commander, not an order?_

 _Please,_ said Scott, and withdrew.

When Emma arrived at the house on the moon she found the main rooms empty, most of the Summers clan presumably doing their duty to the Council in whatever way their captains saw fit. Or they’d fucked off to space to drink and gamble, in the case of Scott’s father and his crew.

She found Scott and Rachel in the extra bedroom, still half-full of unpacked boxes, clothes and books and strange knick-knacks gathered by the various residents of the House over decades of what could generously be called extremely _interesting_ lives. Emma saw Logan’s set of katanas in one corner, Jean’s diploma from ESU lying half-hidden beneath a draft of Alex’s dissertation, frustration marked in red pen.

The unpacked belongings had been shoved to one side, revealing strange chalk markings on the floor, what looked to Emma’s amateur eye like magic sigils. In the center of the room was a metal folding chair. Rachel knelt next to it, carefully not touching the chalk, looking up at the figure sitting in it, dormant.

Emma blinked. It was Jean. And also it wasn’t.

It was Jean’s _body_ . To Emma’s normal eyes, she looked like she was sleeping, her chest rising and falling peacefully, her lips slightly parted. But to Emma’s mental eye there was a coiling _thing_ where her mind should be. It felt slick and sharp at once, almost oily. Emma didn't get too close.

“You see the problem,” said Scott from where he stood by the door.

Emma took a step into the room, skirting the patterns. “She drew these?”

Scott nodded. “Ray was the only one here when she got back from the Five,” he said.

Rachel spoke up without taking her eyes off of her mother’s body. “She managed to pass herself off as Jean for long enough to half-complete whatever _this_ was supposed to be before I noticed something was up,” she said.

Emma raised an eyebrow at her. “What tipped you off? The witch-marks or the fact that it feels like there’s a snake in her skull?”

Rachel gave her the finger.

Emma smirked. "If you were able to knock her out and keep her under this way, that's another sign it's really not Jean," she said. She could feel Scott disapproving of her mocking tone, but she couldn't help it. She loved making Rachel bristle.

"Also my thought," Rachel said evenly. "Which is good."

"We could kill her," Emma suggested.

Rachel shot her a look, the only one so far.

Emma rolled her eyes. "It's a brave new world. Death solves many problems. She just did another of her famous sacrifice plays, right? So let her do it again. Hard reset. Like turning your computer on and off again." 

Rachel gave her another, slightly more amused look.

"I have _spoken_ to an IT professional in my life, yes," Emma said icily. She crossed her arms. "If you're squeamish, get Logan to do it."

"No," said Scott.

Emma looked at him, faintly surprised. His thoughts were clouded to her, not walled-off but hidden unless she pushed, the line between his eyes deepening. 

"I wouldn't ask Logan to kill Jean," Scott said. "There are limits, Emma."

 _Are there?_ Emma wanted to ask. _Will you show me where they are? Because I've been adrift without boundaries ever since we got to this damn island._ But she kept the thought as thought. It wasn't the time.

"Besides," Scott said, "we can't kill her. She's my wife."

"Yes," Emma said slowly, "and she of all people is used to—"

Scott shook his head sharply. "Not Jean." He still hadn't stopped staring at the woman sitting in the center of the room, casually inhabiting Jean Grey. "Maddie."

Emma barely had time to register her own shock, because the invocation of the name seemed to snap the figure in the chair into wakefulness. She flung out an arm, hand crooked into a claw. It never made physical contact with Rachel where she was kneeling at her side, but the younger Grey crumpled anyway with a pained grasp, clutching her head. 

Madelyne Pryor rose like the prow of a ship, none of her muscles involved in the motion. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, but they zig-zagged horribly around til they showed green irises, blazing with a different kind of power than Jean's ever had. Her gaze flicked contemptuously across Emma to settle with a kind of catlike satisfaction on Scott.

He swallowed hard. Emma could feel his horror, his hope, his fear, his absolute confusion—and under it an unspeakable, muffled tenderness, made unbearably sharp by guilt. "Maddie," he said softly. "Madelyne."

Pryor took a step forward. Emma almost expected Jean's practical boots to click against the floor like stiletto heels. 

Slowly, Scott raised his hand to his visor in warning, and Maddie started to laugh.

The sound was horrible, something out of a nightmare. It rolled through the small room like thunder, bouncing off the walls, getting louder with each echo. Emma saw Rachel, who had been starting to rise, flinch away from the sound as if she could feel it slap against her skin. She reached out a mental hand to her, felt the blazing warmth of Rachel's mind gripping her own.

_Ready?_

An almost imperceptible nod.

 _Three. Two. One._ "Be quiet," Emma snapped, all the force of her mind and Rachel's behind it like a hammer.

The laughter stopped, leaving ringing silence in its place. Jean's body crumpled, slumped back into her chair.

"Emma," Scott said, low and horrified. "What did you do?"

Emma ignored him, circling the woman at the center of the room, feeling out the edges of her mind. 

She knew Madelyne Pryor, of course. She'd been Scott's therapist before she was ever his lover, after all, and while many of their sessions revolved around Jean, one could hardly avoid the first wife in the room, especially when the two were both physically identical and—since Maddie's death—psychically intertwined.

And of course there was the mark she had left on the world. Emma herself had not experienced the Goblin Queen's initial rise power, too busy picking up the pieces of a shattered Hellfire Club, but she had certainly felt its effects—the twisting and coming-alive of an entire city; the devastating kidnapping of hundreds of children.

Emma had fought a couch.

The only time they’d come in contact, it hadn’t _really_ been Madelyne, but some kind of psychic force made semi-flesh, hungry, yearning for a real human form. She’d tried to exhume Jean’s corpse and force her way back into it, but Emma and Scott had foiled her, tricking her into discorporating again.

Now, here, she sized up her opponent. It was delicate work. The oil-slick ever-moving coil of darkness clouding her was gone--perhaps used up in whatever she'd done to Rachel?-- but the mind inhabiting Jean's head was a complex nest of thorns and barbed wire, built specifically to keep people like her out.

Jean's own mind was all smooth edges, deceptively airy spaces, and doors with a hundred complex locks. A house elegantly and effortlessly crafted by an architect with innumerable enemies. Emma knew it; she knew the entryways and vestibules that she'd been allowed to know like the back of her hand, and in darker times she'd forced her way into more private, interior rooms, waged war through hallways and shattered walls.

She wasn't standing outside of it now. She was on the slopes of a volcano, embers stinging against her skin; she was lost in deep space, her blood pounding in her veins, her lungs collapsing; she was hip-deep in snow, a furious blizzard swirling around her. Cold spiked up her spine, but she smiled, anchoring herself. This last was more than a defense mechanism. Somewhere here there was a shred of truth. She closed her eyes, letting go of her hold on her psychically-constructed self and becoming only something that _sought,_ that _touched._ An outstretched hand.

Her mental fingers met the warm wood of a door, and the rest of a small cabin built itself outward from that point of contact. Picturesque windows were lit golden from within, and a thin, incongruous plume of smoke rose from the chimney, unmoved by the piercing winds that roared across the surrounding mountainside.

Emma tested the doorknob. It was unlocked, and through the keyhole she could feel a thin thread of something familiar and shifting - surprise; amusement; cautious welcome.

Emma pulled away, the reality of the room room reinstating itself around her in a soundless instant.

"She's okay," she heard Rachel say. "We haven't hurt her, just. Stopped her. For now."

Emma looked at Scott, still frozen in the doorway. "Good news," she said. "Jean's mind is still there."

She felt more than saw him relax, though mostly he just continued to radiate misery. She tried not to read him, these days, out of courtesy, but sometimes the line between intimately knowing someone's body language and reading their thoughts was fuzzier than one might expect. She crossed to him, leaning up to press a reassuring kiss to his cheek. "Don't worry, darling. I'll fix this."

She ran a hand down his arm. He relaxed further in its wake, giving over some of his tension, some of his burden, to her. "Thank you, Emma."

Letting her touch linger at his wrist, Emma turned to look at his daughter. "Rachel," she said, "can I speak with you?"

The younger Grey had been massaging her temples, presumably ridding herself of whatever effect Pryor's psionic blow had had on her. She blinked, lowering her hands. "Of course," she said. "What's up?"

Emma squeezed Scott's hand and let him go. 

He took her point. "I'll—leave you to it. You’ll let me know—”

“Always.” Emma smiled at him until he'd closed the door behind him, then turned to Rachel, crossing her arms. "So," she said. "Why am I doing this?"

Rachel stared at her. "Uh. Because we're all on the same side now? Because my dad asked you to? Because you don't hate my mom as much as you pretend? All of the above?"

Emma shook her head. "That's not what I mean. I mean, why am _I_ doing this, and not you?"

Rachel opened her mouth. Emma held up a hand. "You're the one who noticed immediately that something was wrong. You knocked her out long enough to bring her here and wait for me. Jean is your mother, and you've worked closely together many more times than she and I have, and she presumably has far fewer instinctive defenses against you, as—I assume, though perhaps incorrectly—you've never attempted to kill her." She narrowed her eyes. "Granting Jean her body back would, in many ways, be far easier for you than it will be for me. Why call me in?"

Rachel's mouth quirked uncomfortably. She raised a shoulder in a half-shrug. "She's my mother.”

Emma raised an eyebrow and waited.

Rachel sighed. "This kind of thing, this—deep psychic work, it's not really what I'm good at. And it always goes both ways. You can't just push yourself into someone's mind without inevitably opening yourself up, too, you know?"

Emma hummed. “And you have barriers. Things you don’t wish to reveal to your mother.”

“Doesn’t everyone have secrets from their parents?” Rachel asked, wry and defensive at once.

Emma, with the ease of long practice, avoided thinking about her parents at all. “Whereas, you figured that she and I had aired out all our dirty laundry. Screamed it in the streets, one might say.”

Rachel grinned. “Something like that,” she said. Her expression grew troubled again. “Plus, like. Madelyne’s proved pretty wily before. You remember when she was trying to steal Mom’s corpse—”

“I remember,” said Emma. Lady Mastermind had tried to keep her down and out of that fight, but she’d broken free—with help. A half-remembered image of Jean’s face, flooded with sunlight. An impossible strength—impossible both in terms of power and because the lender was dead—loaned without expectation of repayment. With the same motion as she’d pulled her mental hand back from the wooden door of the cabin, and with a similar loss of warmth, Emma turned away.

“I’m genetically similar enough that it’s a risk, opening myself up that way.” Rachel raised a hand to her jaw, running her fingertips over the sharp, radial Hound tattoos that bordered her face. “It wouldn’t be the first time I lost control of myself, or been host to a mind not my own. I’m vulnerable. You—” She raised her eyebrows. “You don’t really _do_ vulnerable.”

Emma inclined her head at the compliment, secretly pleased. “Well. I told Scott I would fix this, and I will.” She sighed and looked at Maddie where she still sat unstirring in the chair. “You’ve got one thing I don’t, though.” 

“What’s that?” Rachel asked.

“Telekinesis,” said Emma, and gestured to Maddie. “C’mon, help me get her up.” She looked Rachel up and down. “I mean, I suppose you could also just pick her up, if you’d like to feel butch.”

Rachel laughed softly. “Thanks.”

She gripped blank air with hands that rippled with power, and the body in the chair rose, ramrod-straight, like a magician's assistant. "Where are we taking her?"

"The White Palace."

Rachel blinked. "But—"

"You want me to do this," Emma said firmly, "we do it my way."

It was easy enough to get Maddie back through the series of portals from the moon to the White Palace. Emma was faintly surprised Krakoa allowed them to transport someone with such coiling malice hiding under their skin, but she supposed Maddie was hardly the only mutant welcome on the island who had steeped themselves at one point or another in evil.

She watched Rachel lower Maddie into the bed in her guest bedroom, Jean's hair splaying out against Emma's white pillowcases like blood. She looked startlingly small.

Rachel brushed her knuckle against the curve of her cheek, then turned to Emma. "So this is your plan? Just stick her in your guest room?" 

Emma sighed. "Not quite," she said, "but you're not going to like the rest.” Speaking of mutants who have steeped themselves in evil. She steeled herself, and reached out.

Selene arrived in a cloud of ugly curiosity and a sickening sweetness that hung oddly in the air. Emma had gotten used to the smell of Krakoa: a slight, constant earthiness, the sharp scent of green. It relaxed her, though she was grudging to admit it—it ran counter to her clean, minimalist aesthetic—and the sudden invasion of alien, concocted scents was jarring.

“Nice perfume,” she said pleasantly. “Attempting to mask the smell of corpse-rot?”

“Interesting way to ask for my help, your Majesty,” said Selene. She paused. “Remind me, are you Black King or White Queen currently?”

Emma gestured at her outfit with a white-gloved hand. “I’ll let you guess. But don’t get any ideas, they’ll keep bringing Shaw back no matter how many times we kill him.”

 _This is a bad idea,_ Rachel said. There was an edge to her mental voice, a vibration, as if she was holding something in herself back from just knifing Selene between the shoulder-blades. _It’s like asking a wolf to guard your henhouse._

 _What a fun, folksy analogy,_ Emma replied. _Been reading a lot of Brothers Grimm?_

Rachel didn’t smile, nor did she bristle, her hackles already so far up they couldn’t possibly rise higher. _Spent some time in Camelot with Rogue and her Excalibur team last week, that stuff sticks in your head._

Emma watched Selene lift one of Jean’s wrists and remove a paintbrush from her cleavage, the handle burnished copper and bone. _Did you forget we don’t have any hens? If anything, it's a spider brooding eggs in there._

 _And my mom_ _is_ in _the spider,_ Rachel shot back.

 _Why, oh why, did she swallow the fly?_ Emma paced around the edges of the room as Selene picked up Jean’s wrist, then reached up to touch her face.

“Hey—” Rachel snapped, moving forward, at the same time that Emma said, “Selene.”

Selene didn’t stop moving. “Relax,” she murmured, her voice coming out cool and liquid, her eyes half-lidded and dark. “You want her power locked away, yes? Her ability to deal pain.”

“Yes,” said Emma. Rachel was silent.

“Then let me work.” Selene tilted Jean’s— _Maddie’s,_ Emma reminded herself firmly, it was so much harder to believe when Maddie wasn’t animating it; Maddie’s chin up, forced her lips open.

Emma crossed to Rachel, close enough to touch, but didn't. Rachel hesitated, and then put a hand on her shoulder.

Selene dipped the brush between Maddie’s lips, and then pulled it upward, a thin ribbon of red following the arc of the brush. Emma fought back a gasp. It was too thin, too red to be blood—it looked almost like ink, like the pigment of Maddie’s lips or tongue pulled out of the bounds of her skin. 

Selene traced a sigil in the air above Maddie’s limp form, the crimson ink hanging for a moment and then fading, and then reached up and pried open Maddie’s left eye. She dipped her brush again. The bristles must not have been quite tangible, because they passed into the inkwell of Maddie’s pupil with no resistance and no visible pain. Selene turned Maddie’s right wrist and drew a second, different glyph, then repeated the gesture with her right eye and left wrist. The eye-black sigils didn’t fade, but lingered on Maddie’s pale skin.

Selene closed her eyes, taking both of Maddie’s hands in hers and murmuring something cool and liquid again. It wasn’t any language Emma knew, but it curled into her ears and stayed—for a moment she had the sensation of water in her ears, and then they were clear again. 

Selene sat back. Her shoulders slumped, suddenly just a too-thin, tired woman in a black dress. Some of the darkness that twinged at the edges of Emma's vision had faded.

On Maddie's wrists, the sigils looked like they'd been drawn in sharpie, like she'd been allowed into a club underage.

"It won't do anything about the telekinesis," Selene warned, her voice still possessed of it's natural lilt but none of the usual velvet weight. "That's Jean's own mutation, not the dark arts."

"I can handle some broken crockery thrown at my head," Emma said dismissively. 

Rachel squeezed her shoulder and let her go. Emma wondered if it was warning or thanks.

Selene stood up. She was still staring down at Maddie's still face. "It would be so easy," she said, her eyes bird-bright and hungry.

Rachel—in the middle of stretching out her shoulders, releasing tension—froze.

Selene smiled, slow. "She's so quiet, in her soul," she said. "I've never felt her so quiet."

"Selene." Emma's heart had picked up, but she kept herself still. "I remind you you are in the presence of a member of the Quiet Council. This is not the Hellfire club." She raised her chin. "You saw what we did to Creed."

Selene let out a small sigh. "So much life, here," she said, "and none of you will give it to me." But she stepped back from the figure on the bed.

Rachel unclenched both of her fists. _If she had made even a motion towards her,_ she said, voice furious, _I would have killed her. If those marks hurt her, I still will._

 _And you will have my full support with the Council for doing so,_ Emma replied immediately. _But for now, let's try to have a little faith._

Rachel shot her a disbelieving look.

"It's a whole new world," said Emma again, and tried to believe it.

+

The first time Jean felt Emma approach the door of the little cabin Maddie had built in her mind, she was surprised. She could feel Rachel, too, all around her; could feel the iron clamp of her mind keeping the blizzard inside Jean’s physical skull from escaping into the wider world. But Rachel was her daughter; she was never quite gone from Jean’s mind. 

But Emma had been a surprise, as had the fact that when she found Jean she’d retreated—her reconnaissance apparently finished. And the second time, when she approached, she knocked.

It was a level of respect that Jean would never have credited her for. Not that she wasn’t pretty sure she could shut Emma out if she wanted to, even under this strange internal house arrest, but she was gratified that she didn’t have to try.

“Come in,” she said.

Emma pushed the door open and stepped inside. She was, of course, dressed head to toe in white, and for a moment it felt as if she might be an emissary of the mountain itself, cloaked in snow. Except that she _felt_ like Emma—cool and slick and sharp and sweet all at once, a knife of ice that promised to conform to your hand but was just as likely to find your heart. 

For a moment just her presence here threatened to destabilize Jean’s careful grip on her own psyche, the puff of Emma’s breath almost enough to topple this house of cards. The walls of the cabin flickered. But she fisted her hands at her sides and the house reasserted itself, as real and solid as anything could be, here.

“She's sleeping," said Emma. 

"I know," said Jean, because she did. She thought perhaps the winds would lessen, when Maddie fell (or was forced to fall) asleep, but if anything they were howling louder now. If she looked out through the cottage windows she could see nightmarish, inhuman shapes in the walls of white.

"I put her in my guest room," Emma said.

Jean—startled—barked a laugh, maybe the loudest sound this little house had heard in years. "What? Why?"

Emma, uncharacteristically, looked a little embarrassed. "I wanted to keep an eye on her, on you, personally," she said. "Plus, I didn't want her in the house with Scott."

Jean's mouth twisted, though she herself couldn't tell if it was a smile or a grimace. "You don't trust him?"

Emma regarded her steadily. "I do," she said. "But trust him to do what? Respect you? Desire you? Respect his first wife? Desire her?" One blonde eyebrow rose slowly. "Respect me? Desire me?"

Jean did smile, then, ducking her head to hide it, and gestured Emma to sit in the old worn armchair by the fire.

Emma opted to lean against its arm instead, her own arms crossed. "Which of those are even in contention anymore? Do you know? Because I don't."

Jean shook her head. "I don't think any of them are," she said quietly.

Emma rolled her eyes. "This damn island."

"It's nice," said Jean. "It feels—free. We don't have to pay attention to human tradition, to heterosexual tradition, to any of it." She shrugged, feeling oddly defensive in a way she hardly ever did with Emma anymore. "We can choose what matters."

"I just wish it came with a guide," said Emma, sounding almost petulant, but it wasn't disagreement.

"You started it, you know," Jean pointed out. "Your affair with Scott, that started this conversation. Opened Scott up to knowing himself better, knowing the love he was capable of."

Emma stared at her, disbelieving. “Don’t you dare thank me for sleeping with your husband, you condescending—”

“No,” Jean interrupted, but she found she was smiling again. “No, fuck you very much for that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be grateful for what you’ve both become because of it. What I've become, because of it."

Emma narrowed her eyes at her. “Say that again.”

“Which bit?” Jean asked. “I thought you said not to thank—”

“No, say “fuck” again.”

Jean stared at her. “What are you, twelve?”

Emma looked around. “In here? Yeah, among other things,” she said, and then it was true, and so was Jean, and they were lying side by side in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. It was dark, both in the room and outside, the kind of warm, pressing dark of a summer night when you were the only house around for miles.

Twelve-year-old Emma was slight, almost a little gangly in silk pajamas, her hair a soft brown and her face startlingly open. She had her head propped up on her elbow, her other hand loose on the sheets between them. “Well?” she demanded, and it was her imperious tone—along with the part of Jean that always knew her, no matter what—that told her it was still Emma.

Jean felt a childish nervousness rise through her like a ghost. She bit her lip and found it already ragged and chapped between teeth not yet straightened by braces. “Fuck,” she said quietly, and it wobbled when it came out.

Emma snorted a completely genuine, inelegant laugh, sounding exactly like a horse, and Jean cracked up in response, dropping her head face-first into the sheets. After a moment, she felt warm fingers slip through her hair, tucking it gently behind her ear.

When she looked up, Emma was an adult again, still lying on her side in this quiet box of memories, her hands gloved to the elbow and kept to herself.

“This isn’t my room,” Jean said, stretching her own legs out, now too long for the short bed. “Or Maddie’s, she never had a childhood at all.”

Emma nodded and sat up slowly. “It’s mine,” she said. “Which I’m not sure I appreciate.”

Jean blinked at her. “What do you mean? You brought us here.”

Emma shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not intentionally. I thought it, yes, but usually my control is better than that. I thought you’d picked it out of the air and made it real. It is your head, after all.”

Jean reached her hands up toward the high ceiling, stretching. Just a lofty white expanse, for young Miss Frost, bordered with delicate moulding. No posters, no little glow-in-the-dark stars, not like the ones Jean had had—constellations carefully reconstructed from her father’s book of astronomy, constellations now subtly but irreparably altered. Altered by _her,_ as easily as peeling a sticker off plaster.

 _Not you,_ Scott would say. _Phoenix. Not you._

"Sometimes," she said. "Sometimes it's my head."

"Stop," Emma snapped.

Jean sat up and looked around. The room around the bed she sat on was gone, dissolved into a horrible swirl of color and feeling, galaxies rushing and exploding and reforming. Emma was a shining, scintillating thing at the center of it, her skin flashed to diamond in instinctive defense against the maelstrom. She was glaring at Jean.

"Pull yourself together," she snarled. A translucent hand closed on Jean's wrist and hauled her to her feet. "What the hell is wrong with you? It's _always_ your head."

Jean took a breath, concentrating, and with the click of a lock they were back in the house in Alaska, the fire now smoldering quietly in the hearth. Emma's grip was still hard as diamond on her wrist, keeping Jean in her space, their faces inches apart. 

"It's always your head," Emma said again, quieter, her eyes shifting over Jean's face. "No matter who's in here with you."

Jean clenched her jaw and tugged her wrist away. Emma let her, but Jean could feel her eyes on her as she stalked across the room and threw herself into Maddie's chair again.

"You're the most skilled telepath I know," said Emma, still with the same quiet intensity. "You want to tell me why I'm having to talk to you like you're a student doing her first psychic imaging?"

Jean shifted her tongue around in her mouth, still feeling the last vestiges of a childish stubbornness clinging to her shoulders. "Not really," she said honestly. 

"Fine," Emma said coolly, "then I’ll guess. I'm good at guessing."

She settled into the armchair across from Jean—a white-leather, much more elegant armchair that Jean was almost certain hadn't been there until Emma had needed it. Despite the royal sulk she was in she allowed herself a small internal smile. Emma's mental manners apparently didn't extend to adding tasteful decor.

"The obvious answer would be that Pryor has done something to you, dealt you some psychic blow when she took over your body. But she doesn't have the skill. Not against you, and not in such a way that it would leave you like this and wouldn't leave a recognizable mark. I've dealt you such a blow before, I know what it looks like."

Jean rolled her eyes. "Are you good at guessing? Or are you just good at bragging?"

"If you would simply tell me why you're acting like such a child, darling, I wouldn't have to do either," Emma shot back.

Jean sighed and uncurled slightly in the chair. 

Emma waited a moment and then continued. "So if it wasn't her, I'm forced to conclude it's you. You're choosing to stay in here in some kind of self-imposed exile in your own head, and your control is shot to shit because if you pull yourself together you'd have to take this place back from her."

Jean met her eyes. "Yes," she said.

Emma stared at her. _"Why?"_

Jean sighed. "Because we're all family, here on Krakoa. Because every mutant gets amnesty."

Emma's brows snapped together. "But—"

Jean straightened. " _All_ of us, Emma. That's Xavier's dream. Hell, it's _my_ dream. Madelyne might be a clone of me, but she's still a mutant. She deserves this as much as the rest of us."

"So you just _let her take your body?_ " Emma demanded.

"I didn't let her," Jean said. "It's—" she stopped to take a breath, trying to talk about this without letting it effect the flimsy film-set facade around them. It was like trying to hold a butterfly in your hands without ever touching its dusty wings. "Every time I die and come back, there's a struggle."

Emma didn't interrupt. Jean wondered if she could feel the tenuous hold she had on their present reality, if she was prepared for wrestling Jean back into control again. "You're right," she said. "This is all my head. But it's not just me in here. Not ever. I'm me, and I'm Madelyne, and I'm Phoenix, and every time I come back all of those aspects of myself wrestle one another to get to the surface. To get to _live._ " She shrugged. "This time, Maddie won."

"But you could take it back. Your head, your mind. You could take back control," Emma insisted.

Jean nodded. "Oh, yes," she said. She could feel it tugging at her, always. _Come home._ "Easy. Probably more easily than staying here and keeping the home fires burning." She gestured to the fireplace. "But I've had more than my fair share of living, Emma. Isn't it just for someone else to get a turn?"

"Just," Emma said flatly. " _Just,_ to let a power-mad witch who married your husband and tried to destroy the world walk around in your body, live with your family—"

"Careful," said Jean, despite herself, "are we talking about Maddie here, or you?"

Emma rolled her eyes but subsided, arms crossed against her chest like a barred door. "I never tried to destroy the world," she muttered. "Where would I shop?"

It was classic Emma deflection, a retreat into her self-constructed stereotype. Her face was turned away, staring into the fire, the fall of her golden hair hiding her face from Jean's eyes. Except it wasn't, because none of this was real; it was all Jean's mind, and without even really meaning it she looked through them, saw Emma's troubled frown, the slight tremble to her lips. 

She studied her, surprised. She would have expected this resistance from Rachel—her daughter had a stubborn streak a mile wide—but had expected Emma to be more reasonable, to see this for what it was: an extension of her role on the Quiet Council, a way to bring another of Xavier's children into the fold. But she looked genuinely upset.

“It’s not as if it’s forever,” she said softly, trying to read the source of Emma’s discomfort. “It’s just until she gets our body killed, and then I’ll come back. I'll win the struggle. I'll be ready.”

Emma turned to stare at her. “And what if she doesn’t? You think she’s going to throw herself into the same stupid heroic situations you would, get offed in the next three days? She’s going to do everything she can to cling to this stupid selfless gift of life, and you’re going to be stuck here, walking this tightrope, going mad. For _decades._ ”

Jean smacked her shoulder companionably with the back of her wrist. “So that’s where you come in. Making sure that doesn’t happen.”

Emma’s mouth quirked, but she was still frowning. “I already tried to get Scott to ask Logan to just kill you.”

She said it as if Jean would find it funny, but even the concept made Jean’s whole brain buzz in horror. The fire flared in the hearth, and somewhere, something shifted, a great groaning of stone. “He said no, right?”

Emma blinked at her. “Yeah, refused outright to consider it. What’s the big deal? He’s done it before, no?”

“Yes,” said Jean tightly. “Shut—shut up, please.”

Emma did, her mouth set in a puzzled line, as Jean crossed her legs, leaned back in her armchair and tried to figure out how to stop a nearly literal landslide of memory.

The first stones that fell were all pain, deep, ripping, physical, and she stretched out her arms as wide as the mountainside and caught them. Working quickly, she wove the pain together in a warp and weft of parallel adamantium lines, a net, a barrier against the rest, rumbling at the distant peaks of her mind. She could feel sweat prickling against her scalp - her mental scalp, her physical scalp, lying Emma’s guest room, felt Maddie stir and cry out. _Come home,_ her body was calling her. _Yield. Feel._

She yanked herself back from both avalanche and wakefulness, spun herself tightly into a self-contained knot, and opened desperate psychic eyes to find she was bent over, her hands fisted in her own hair, Emma on her knees in front of her. “Jean,” she was saying, low and frantic. “Jean. Jean—”

“He killed me,” said Jean, ragged, expelling the pain as words. “Over, and over, and over. To save me from being the Phoenix, to save me from myself. Because I asked him to.” She took a breath. “And I will _never_ ask him to do it again.”

“I—noted." Emma sounded shaken. The cabin around them felt empty and strange. Jean felt suddenly that she wanted to be back in Emma’s childhood bedroom. Wanted a cup of tea. Wanted to be anywhere but here. Wanted to see Logan, the Logan he could _be,_ now, and Scott, and her kids, the babble of the Summers clan surrounding her like a silk cocoon. Wanted to _rest._

But she couldn’t. Not yet. Not if she believed in what they were doing, here, in this last best hope for mutant-kind. Could she go back to imprisoning a mutant within her just because she was _tired?_ After a _day?_

She sat up a little, reaching out a hand, and Emma met her halfway, folding their palms together. For the first time since she'd gotten here, Jean felt something slip through Emma's shields, carried by that mental touch: worry, and anger, and intense relief.

“I don’t mean you have to get me killed,” Jean said. “Just make her understand.”

Emma didn’t move from where she was kneeling on the floor. “Understand what?”

“What we’re doing here,” Jean said. “The vision. The plan. That my stupid, selfless gift of life, as you called it, comes with a price.” She used her free hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. “She signs on to the deal, just like we all did. She takes my place—”

Emma let go of her hand to push herself to her feet. “On the Council? Do you hear yourself—”

Jean shook her head. “Not on the Council. Not yet, anyway, you’ll have to work that out, appoint someone temporarily. But on X-Force. In Krakoan society. She’ll have to give back.” She cocked her head. “And yes, she’ll have to fight. She may even have to die. And when she does…” she gestured at the walls around her.

Emma was staring down at her. She no longer looked upset, but she didn’t look convinced, either. “I don’t like this,” she said, “but it’s clear you’re not going to be talked around. Not today, anyway.”

Jean smiled up at her. “You’re a smart woman, Ms. Frost.”

“I learn,” Emma said dryly. She started toward the door, then paused, uncertain. “Is there anything…”

“You can bring me?” Jean finished for her, amused. “It’s my head, remember? Anything I want, I get.” She gestured again, this time with the glass full of red wine that was suddenly in her hand.

Emma grimaced at the matching wineglass in her own hand, and it—and Jean’s—became neat little shot glasses, from the looks of them pure diamond, brimming with sharp-scented tequila. A second longer and they were accompanied by a slice of lime, and a line of salt around the diamond rim.

She shrugged at Jean’s raised eyebrows. “Needed something a little stronger to deal with the mess you’re dropping in my lap.”

“Fair enough.” Jean raised the shot in a salute. “I’ll owe you for this.”

“Damn right,” Emma muttered, and they downed their shots. When Jean opened her eyes from her wince at the burn, she was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, more Maddie next time!! I adore her, I promise this will overall be a deeply sympathetic and complex view of her we're just still ramping up into it. Bear with me, folks.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note updated rating and tags!

Emma felt Madelyne wake up. A strange, thrumming sensation in her inner ear, like hearing someone start an engine a very long way away. It took her a moment to realize it must be Selene’s magic kicking in, prompting her own power to sit up and take notice of another mind active in her home. 

She took her time finishing her breakfast, squeezing her half-grapefruit into her bowl and drinking the remaining juice, relishing the tartness. Fruit was one luxury Krakoa provided more than any other.

She had just pushed herself to her feet when Madelyne appeared in the doorway to her kitchen. Emma didn’t pause in her journey to the sink to wash her dishes. “Good morning.”

Madelyne watched her. She didn’t have Jean’s mental shields, but she had something—scraps of steel, cobbled together, strong enough to withstand a direct blow but offering plenty of places to push one's hands in and _pry._ Emma resisted the urge.

“Morning,” she said at last. “Ms. Frost.”

“Emma,” said Emma, “as you are my guest.”

“Is that what I am?” Madelyne asked. Her voice—not the twisted cackle of the day before, but a human woman’s voice—was different than Jean’s, or perhaps it was just the way she spoke: it was lower, pitched differently, but with the same sweet cadence. When Emma met her eyes, she looked wary.

“For now,” said Emma, and crossed to her. She gave Maddie a once-over. “And as such, can I offer you some different clothes? Since we’re dropping the pretense.” She ushered Madelyne in front of her. Establishing a norm of mutual cooperation was one thing. Turning your back on a murderer was another. “It might make you feel more yourself.”

Maddie snorted, but she allowed Emma to shepherd her down the hall, past the guest room and through her own bedroom to her walk-in.

Emma pressed a hand to the wall. The door slid open with a soft _woosh_. "Choose anything you like."

The closet was almost as large as the guest room Emma had given Maddie. Both walls were lined with racks of clothes—the tailored suits and coats she preferred in these days of free expression, the corsets and skirts from her Hellfire years, tasteful loungewear and athleisure for more casual occasions. Much of it was white, of course, but there were dark bodysuits and capes from her various stints as Black King, and here and there spots and dashes of color. Below the clothes were neat lines of shoes; above, row upon row of small drawers filled with jewelry. Mostly jewelry. A few elegant knives, one discreet pistol, small enough to fit in a handbag. She was pretty sure somewhere there was a quite fetching set of brass knuckles, but she hadn't had occasion to wear them in a long time—when your own knuckles could turn to diamond, there wasn't much point.

"My apologies," she said, as Madelyne turned back to look at her. "I don't own much red."

Maddie shrugged, looking faintly puzzled. "I've never really worn it anyway. It’s a little much, with the hair.”

Emma bit back a response about blood-red corsets and riding crops. She was nurturing a suspicion. "Can I get you anything to drink while you make your choice? Tea? Wine?" It was early for alcohol, but Emma privately suspected _she’d_ be drinking early, during this experiment, and it seemed rude to remove the option for Maddie to do the same.

"Coffee?" Maddie suggested, reaching out to examine a black cropped jacket.

Emma gave her a nod and withdrew.

If Madelyne had thought to catch her out by requesting coffee, she would be disappointed. Though she might have tried her best to bury it under years of assumed accents and ambiguous origin stories, she had once been a Massachusetts native, and no amount of Anglophilic pretension could bury her secret preference nor her snobbery over the quality of beans. She had Kate bring her back a large bag every time she docked in Costa Verde or Ecuador. Or, for that matter, in Boston.

When Madelyne found her in the kitchen again, Emma paused mid-pour from her silver french press. She was—the first thing that came to mind was _dressed down,_ in a soft, wide-necked grey sweater and a pair of green cargo pants that Emma had _certainly_ never owned and wouldn't be caught dead in. She was wearing _hiking boots._ Her hair, though still Jean's haircut, somehow seemed styled differently, her long red locks framing her face and curling delicately up under her jaw.

She was certainly not unattractive like this—it would be nigh-on impossible for someone with the face and body of Jean Grey to be unattractive—but it was about as far from the creature of pure vampiric seduction that Emma had faced off against years before as one could get.

She raised her chin challengingly against Emma's gaze. "Surprised?"

Emma gestured her into the chair opposite her. "Intrigued," she said, "as those are not my clothes."

Maddie sat, tucking one foot up beneath her. "You told me to choose anything I liked," she said. "I chose."

Emma reached out. Maddie flinched back a moment, and then cautiously allowed her to run her fingers over the sleeve of her sweater. It was real, and soft—cashmere, to Emma's expert touch.

And when Maddie twitched to shake her off, Emma saw the flash of dark ink at her pulse-point, Selene's sigil unbroken.

So either Selene's magick hadn't worked properly, or the small sorceries it took to fabricate clothing were benign enough not to set them off. Or, of course, Selene had done something entirely else than what Emma had requested. She hated having so many variables.

"It's lovely," she said, and then, testing her other theory: "We've never met, but I should have known you were a woman of taste."

Maddie shrugged. "You're a bit flashy, but I think I get it." She picked up her coffee cup. "I think it would have been easier, if it had been you."

Emma didn't ask what she meant. If they hadn't met—if this Maddie wasn't the one she'd faced off against years before, if that Maddie had dissipated into psychic energy and vanished—then it was likely so were the other versions of her that had cropped up over the years, projections and images and ghosts of a woman that had left a world manic and scarred in her wake. A woman that everyone believed they knew. This, likely, was the true Goblin Queen: a woman just post-death, and perhaps more pertinent, post-abandonment by her husband, left for the person she was created to imitate. A copy cast off in favor of the original.

 _Abandonment._ That was always the way Scott phrased it. _After I abandoned Maddie…_ Emma had always rolled her eyes, firmly taken his side, as his therapist and his friend (but they hadn't really been friends, then, just lonely thrumming minds and hearts and bodies desperate for connection; _friends_ came later, in the shards of a shattered world; _friends_ , she supposed, was what they were now). 'Abandoned' had always felt so dramatic, invoking deserted islands or orphaned children alone in train stations, not a fully grown woman who ended up taking Scott's place on a team of X-Men and clawing her way to demonic, world-threatening power. She'd hardly seemed abandoned—until her bid for power, she hadn’t been alone. She'd had the X-Men, an endless contingent of demons. She'd had her son.

But sitting here across from the woman herself, soft and unpretentious in cashmere and cargo pants, _abandoned_ felt more apt. There was a strangeness to her. It wasn't childishness, and it certainly wasn't innocence. But it was the same feeling Emma got when she was talking to a duplicate of Jamie Madrox: a kind of looseness of existence, a sense that while you were speaking to a full person, with a full complement of experiences and memories, everyone involved knew that he might not have existed yesterday and he may not exist tomorrow. But there was a steel in Maddie's gaze that Jamie had never gotten close to, a desperation to conquer the _now_ if the _now_ was all she had. And entirely unlike Jamie, she seemed absolutely, almost defensively alone.

She took a sip of her coffee, and made a face. She set it down. "You know, most people ask their guests how they like their coffee."

Emma blinked at the cup, and then realized she'd automatically made it up the way Jean liked—two sugars, one milk—some part of her still believing that Jean couldn't have abdicated control so completely, that this was all some kind of elaborate test. "I apologize," she said, "I assumed that taste was something biological, in your taste buds themselves, and thus your taste would be identical." It was a lie—she knew very well that clones had differing tastes; she couldn't get Sophie to eat a green vegetable to save her life, and once she'd caught Phoebe drinking and _enjoying_ one of Logan's foul Canadian beers. But she thought it best not to mention that she'd thought of Maddie as Jean, even unconsciously.

"In some things," Maddie said. "Anything we discovered before the age of seventeen. Music." The corner of her mouth turned up. "Men."

Emma stood up, picking up Maddie's cup and pouring it down the sink. "Seventeen?"

"When Jean joined the X-Men, and when I was created," Maddie explained, matter-of-fact. "Everything before then is Jean's experience, implanted in my head. I remember liking the things she liked, so I do." She accepted the empty cup. "Neither of us started drinking coffee til after that, in college." She poured herself another cup and left it cooling at her elbow, undoctored. "Figures that she'd like it light and sweet. All sweetness and light, our Ms. Grey."

There was something in her tone that rankled. "She might surprise you," Emma found herself saying. "She's _kind,_ yes, but she's got hidden depths, hidden darknesses."

Maddie looked at her levelly. "Does she? Are you certain? Or are those darknesses just me?”

Emma sipped her own coffee, also black, and changed the subject. "You were a pilot?"

It was the first time she'd seen Maddie look surprised. "Yeah," she said. "I flew small aircraft up in Alaska. Mostly shuttling around researchers or actors or tour groups." She drank. "It's how Scott and I met. I took him to a family reunion."

Alaska. Emma thought about that little mental cabin tucked against the mountainside. Had their short-lived happy home really looked like that? Storybook-quaint, the smoke rising from the chimney, not a pillow or a picturesque American novel out of place? Had any home really ever looked like that?

She wondered if Maddie knew that Jean was living there now, keeping her powers under tight rein, or if she thought that when she triumphed in this round of their eternal power struggle she'd destroyed or trapped her somehow. 

"Ms. Frost," said Maddie. "I would like to see my son."

Emma set down her coffee. She drummed her finger-tips against the white marble breakfast bar. “That might be arranged,” she said cautiously. 

“Might,” said Maddie, her green eyes bright. “Depending on what?"

"What were you drawing?" Emma countered. "On the floor of the Summer House."

"The Summer House," Maddie repeated, and then laughed, short and sharp. "Of course."

Emma raised her eyebrows at her. “You didn’t know what it was called?” She ran a finger around the curled handle of her coffee mug. “How much do you know about what we’re doing here?” How much did she know of what Jean knew?

Maddie ignored the spoken question in favor of the unspoken, though Emma had not thought it to her. “I feel moments of emotion, mostly,” she said. “And with them sometimes comes the knowledge. Anger wrapped in the source of betrayal. Sorrow wrapped in the names of the dead. Hope, wrapped in utopia.” She smiled slightly. "I felt her rage, when you slept with Scott. It is the most I've ever felt us align." She cocked her head. “And then I felt her put you back together, piece by piece. Rebuilding her enemy from the ground up.”

Emma remembered, too, the impossible care of that rebuilding, Jean’s mind catching and holding and fitting together every tiny scintillating piece of her. She tried not to think about it too much—not because it was unpleasant; quite the opposite. "We haven't been enemies in a long time," she said. "I would like to believe we're friends."

Maddie sipped her coffee, looking at her through lowered lashes. "Would you like to know what she believes? What she thinks of you? I could tell you that.”

Something in her voice made Emma check her wrists again, the sharpie-black sigils not doing much to reassure her. Maddie had a strange, hungry air, the air of a devil offering a deal.

The temptation was sharp. Emma knew what almost everyone in the world thought of her, whether she wanted to or not. She knew who wanted her, who hated her, who wanted to hate her but didn't, who wanted to forgive her but couldn't quite see their way clear. She knew who dismissed her as stupid, as disloyal; she knew who, despite everything, still saw her as kind. Even with other telepaths, she'd had glimpses and flashes, and as part of Xavier talking her into joining this whole mad endeavor he’d shown her whole-cloth what he believed: that she was changeable, ambitious, untrusting and untrustworthy, but that she _cared_ —and that he couldn’t do this without her.

It had been one of the things that convinced her to do this, to try, again, where they had all always failed.

But Jean… she’d seen impressions of what Jean thought of her, but only when they’d fought, and all of it had been immediate: she was furious with her, intimidated by her, dismissive and disdainful of her. Nothing of what she felt when she saw Emma smile, nothing of what she knew of Emma’s core being. When they spoke, she had to rely on Jean’s face and words without any thought behind them. With Jean, as with no one else she had ever attempted to be close with, she was like anyone else, any human: Disarmed. Powerless.

And here was Madelyne Pryor, offering her power.

She took a breath. “When she wants to tell me,” she said firmly, “then I’ll know.”

If Maddie was disappointed, she didn’t show it. She folded her hands. “I was trying to get to Limbo.”

Emma blinked, thrown for a moment at the return to her earlier question. “Why?”

Maddie looked at her coolly. “My son,” she said. 

For a moment Emma thought it was somehow an answer to her question, that young Cable might be caught up with Limbo business in ways she wasn’t aware of, and then she realized she was again being offered a bargain: Maddie would disclose, but not for free.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and stood. “Stay here.”

It was an unnecessary command—she’d had a word with young Doug Ramsey and, through him, Krakoa, about not letting Madelyne through any of the gates unless she was present and conscious, and—with a strange lack of curiosity and very few questions—he’d agreed. Which didn’t bar Maddie from using the mundane doors, but she could lock those from the outside and she wouldn’t begrudge her the sea air from the balcony. Besides, if she decided to fling herself from it, it would put an end to this idiotic experiment of Jean’s and everything would be fine.

She allowed herself the smallest indulgent thought about pushing her, and found it less pleasant than she’d expected.

She found Scott easily enough—she could feel him, always, a distant steady flame in her mind, a tiny ache like a splinter trapped under healed skin. He was on the island, not the moon, standing with Logan outside Forge’s workshop, talking in low voices. Logan cut himself off as she approached, but Scott didn’t, turning to take her in at Logan’s sudden silence and pitching his voice so she could hear.

She loved him. It was a quiet thought, these days, blooming occasionally like a rosebush outside her kitchen window.

“—have to ask someone else to fill in for a while. Siryn, maybe.”

“Trying to fill your requisite redhead slot on X-Force?” Emma asked, giving Logan a nod.

He nodded back, surprisingly non-hostile, though there was a tension to his shoulders that, for once, she both immediately understood and empathized with.

“Theresa has years of co-leadership experience in the previous version of the team,” Scott said, “though of course it’s harder to compensate for Jean’s telepathy. We could give Quire more responsibility—”

“The kid’s a timebomb,” Logan said. “I’m barely comfortable with him watching my back from two steps behind me, giving him _more_ power to fuck around with our heads is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

“You want to hear a worse one?” Emma asked. “Jean thinks Madelyne should do it.”

Scott stared at her. Logan perked up like a dog hearing its own name. “You talked to Jeannie?”

“She’s fine,” Emma said. “She’s holed up in the back of Madelyne’s mind, in a quaint little Alaska cottage. By choice.” She held up a hand to forestall Logan’s immediate bluster. “She seems to think that according to the rules of Krakoa, Madelyne deserves a chance at amnesty, too. She’s sitting out until Pryor gets herself killed, presumably while running around with your little team, and then she’ll take the body back.”

“That’s insane,” Logan growled. 

Emma was in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with him, but she didn’t take her eyes off Scott.

“And Madelyne?” Scott asked quietly. “How is she? What does she think?”

“I haven’t conveyed Jean’s plan to her,” Emma said. “I’m not convinced I ever will. My first priority is to the safety of the island, and until we know what she was attempting to do with her witchy circle, I don’t plan to let her out of my house or tell her anything she doesn’t absolutely need to know.”

Scott nodded, slowly. “Sage seems to think they’re some flavor of demonic, which makes sense. She said maybe portal-magic.”

“She was trying to get into Limbo,” Emma said. “That’s all she’ll say for now.” She took a breath. “Until after we let her talk to Cable.”

“Bad idea,” muttered Logan, but he, too, was focused on Scott, his thoughts and the line of his jaw both tight with worry. “He’s not even _her_ Cable, right?”

“He is,” Scott said. His mouth twitched humorlessly sideways. “He’s not _our_ Cable, but he’s as much her Cable as the one he killed. Their timelines split—after. She never really got a chance to know him, any him, as anything but a baby.”

 _And that’s not your fault,_ Emma said silently, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her. “I think she wants to, now. The question is whether or not we let her.”

“Why does she want to talk to him?” Logan asked. “Something tells me it ain’t just out of motherly instinct.”

Emma hesitated. “I think it is, actually.” 

“You think?” Logan raised an eyebrow at her and tapped his temple with one blunt finger. “You don’t know?”

Emma shook her head. “I can’t read her,” she said. “Jean—she’s—Maddie can’t quite get a grasp on her powers in order to read me, or anyone else, I think partially because Jean’s still in there, using them to hold her little sanctuary together. But her shields are still up to the outside world, and I won’t risk trying to break them while Jean’s hold on herself is so tenuous.”

Logan sighed. “Great. So what do we do?”

“We let her see Nathan,” said Scott. 

Emma raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re sure?”

“He’s not connected to Limbo at all,” Scott said, crossing his arms. “If it gives us the information we need, and if you think she wants to talk to him as—” He faltered. “As a mother to her son. That’s good enough for me.”

“Thank you,” said Emma, meaning _for trusting my judgment,_ but also meaning something else, something less comfortable. She’d _wanted_ him to say yes, she realized. Wanted the woman she’d sat across from at her breakfast bar that morning to have something, some comfort, even if she couldn’t quite conceive of wanting that for Madelyne Pryor as she’d always known her. 

Always _thought_ she’d known her.

“Logan, can you talk to Theresa?” Scott asked, and Logan nodded. “I’ll go get Nate, and bring him to you at—”

“No,” said Emmma, and sighed. “That’s the other thing. I’m sorry, but I don’t want you near this.”

Scott stared at her. “She’s my wife,” he said, and some of that tension was back—had never really gone, Emma realized, just been papered over by responsibility, by trust, by handling what he could handle and letting her do her work. 

“She’s not,” Emma said. “Jean is your wife, and arguments could be made for Logan—”

“Fuck off,” said Logan, mildly.

“—But Madelyne hasn’t been your wife for a very long time. And you still conceiving of her that way is going to shred any hope we have of Jean’s plan working. Or any plan working, really.” Emma reached up to touch his jaw. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But the only way this works is if we let her be her own person. As much as that’s possible, for someone like her.”

“She always was her own person,” Scott said quietly. “And I never could let her be, not even when I wanted to most.”

Emma smiled at him, waiting. After a long moment he turned his jaw, pressing a kiss to her palm, and she dropped her hand. “Alright,” he said. “Okay. You go find Nate, I’ll just, uh.”

Logan nudged him. “Come with me to talk to Terry,” he said. “She’s been hanging out with Black Tom lately, trying to help him with his drinking, and something about that guy gives me the creeps.”

The corner of Scott’s mouth turned up. “You just want someone to deflect when Terry decides maybe you’ve also been hitting the bottle too hard.”

Logan sighed, not denying it. “I could deal with it if it were just proselytizing. I can _ignore_ proselytizing. But the woman’s speakin’ from a place of experience, which means more often than not she’s right.” He gestured with his head. “C’mon.”

Scott’s smirk didn’t fade. In Emma’s head, through the link she never quite let close, he said, _What else are husbands for, right?_

Emma rolled her eyes and went to find his son.

She and Cable—any Cable, or for that matter any Nathan Summers, or any Nathan Grey—had never really seen eye to eye. It wasn’t a case of morality—if anything, they had been aligned in that more often than she and Scott had been. He was just—crass. Militaristic, tapping into a masculinity bordering on the absurd. There was no room for negotiation or finesse, and negotiation and finesse were some of the best tools in Emma’s arsenal.

She’d grown to respect the older version, however, as both a leader and a member of Scott’s ever-widening, bizarre family unit. He’d managed in recent years to almost come out the other side of his hypermasculine posturing into something open and charming, softened by his own experience of fatherhood, humbled by his demotion from a messiah himself to the steward for one. And now his daughter powered the resurrection machine at the heart of Krakoa, making good, perhaps, on a prophecy thought false. 

And that Cable had never lived to see it, slain by his own youthful hands. That, too, Emma assumed, was prophecy. She wondered if young Nathan would tell his mother so. She wondered how the Goblin Queen would feel about her grand-daughter’s roundabout rise to power, if power was what Hope wielded, now; if she herself was not simply being wielded by the triplicate cabal of Charles and Erik and Moira McTaggart.

She found her quarry in the stadium seating outside the Arena, watching Marrow and Glob circle each other warily. He looked bored, the excessive caution both parties were taking apparently not what he was here for.

She stepped up next to him. “Nathan.”

He glanced sideways at her. “Ms. Frost.”

She set her jaw. He’d yet to drop the formality, despite seamlessly incorporating “Uncle Logan” into his vocabulary (a familial marker devoid of real meaning, but one must make do—she couldn’t blame him for not wanting to be counted among Logan’s children, adopted or otherwise). She couldn’t read his surface thoughts, but she thought his eyes got a little more pleased at the change in her face. Perhaps that’s why he did it.

She schooled her features to greater impassivity. “We need to talk about your mother.”

Cable straightened up. “Dad and Ray said something went wrong with the resurrection, but you were handling it,” he said, voice cautious. “Is she okay?”

“I am, and she is,” Emma said. “But I’m not talking about Jean.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending for a moment, and then his eyes cleared, his chin dropping, suddenly looking much more his age. “What do you want to know?”

Emma considered, cocking her head. This was a surprise; she’d expected a shrug, an _I don’t know her,_ a _why are you asking._ Cable shifted under her gaze. She could press; find out what he knew. Or.

“She’s possessing Jean,” she said. “Right now. The real Madelyne, before she died, or at least that’s the theory.” My theory, she didn’t say. It felt too personal. “She wants to talk to you.”

Cable stared at her. “What—what for?

Emma allowed her face to soften, some of her genuine sympathy to show through. “She’s your mother, Nathan. You’re the son she’s never known.”

Cable dropped his eyes and turned back to watch the fight. There was a long pause where Emma thought maybe that would be all she got, that he was dismissing her outright, but at last he licked his lips and spoke. “I went to see her,” he said quietly. “A few years ago for me. A decade, for you. Before New York, when she and dad lived in Alaska.”

Emma blinked, surprised. She knew he was capable of time travel, of course, but it had never occurred to her that he might use it for this—as far as she knew, his older counterpart had avoided looping through timelines for personal reasons, too aware of the fractal nature of time. She wondered if it was sentiment that allowed his younger self to be freer in his temporality, or hubris.

“I didn’t talk to anyone,” Cable continued, as if responding to her thoughts, and she quickly checked her shields to make sure he wasn’t. “And no one saw me. I just—watched them, just for a moment.” His teeth worried at his lip, his eyebrows crooked just a little. Emma had always seen the ways he looked like his father—the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders—but now she recognized his mother in him, too, as he stared down at the fighters below. His eyes, quick and narrowed, blue to her green but with the same restless hunger. “They looked happy.”

“They were happy,” Emma confirmed, “for a while.”

Cable shot her a glance.

“You know I was your father’s therapist,” Emma replied to his wordless question.

“I know you fucked him while pretending to be Jean,” Cable replied, mostly deadpan but with the tiniest bit of teenage relish.

Emma bit back the leftover teacherly impulse to reprimand him for his language. He wasn’t her charge, and unless things settled down enough around here that they could start a school, he never would be. She switched to talking mind-to-mind, aware of the other people—though there weren’t many—in the stands around them. There was no point in making the stipulation that she’d never technically touched Scott back then; not to another telepath. She’d never really tried to make that argument to Jean, either. _No,_ she said, _I pretended to be Jean, and then we fucked._

Cable’s lip curled slightly. _There’s a difference?_

 _Yes,_ said Emma simply. _I was what Madelyne wasn’t._

Cable blinked, startled. “She’s her clone.”

Emma raised her eyebrows at him. “You know better.”

“But—” Cable frowned. “You’re saying they were happy when Scott could pretend she was Jean?”

“No,” said Emma. “I’m saying they were happy when there was no chance of her being Jean at all.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Jean was dead, for the very first time. Back then, that meant something. When she came back…” She shrugged. “We are all tormented by what-ifs, in our own way. It’s powerful to imagine what could have been. And when what could have been becomes, however improbably, what could be again…”

Cable turned to face her fully for the first time. “You think she wants to be my mother.”

Emma hesitated. “I think she wants to see her son.”

“And if that’s not who I want to be?” Cable asked, eyes complicated.

“Then you can say that,” Emma replied. “Tell her whatever you want. Tell her her son is dead, at your own hand. It has the advantage of being true.”

Cable stared at her for another moment, the wall behind his eyes as impassive as Jean’s ever had been, and then, slowly, he nodded.

+

Jean paced holes in the floor of the cabin, built them back up into wood, into stone, into the impervious metal, crystal, or fleshy floors of various alien spacecraft from her memory, and then paced holes in them again. She’d always prided herself on being good at being alone, enjoying creating and finding her own space in the world. But this wasn’t her space, and all the things she would normally do to pass the time were closed off to her. 

She couldn’t read any of the books on the shelves in the cabin’s little living room because they weren’t real - any words they contained would be some mixture of her own subconscious creating what she _thought_ their contents were and whatever Madelyne remembered their contents to be—assuming she’d ever read them at all.

Outside the storm had settled, but what the near-avalanche during Emma’s visit told her was that any exploration she might do outside the walls of the cabin was fraught with pitfalls of memory - her own or others' - that might topple Madelyne's shaky control and send Jean's consciousness flooding back into the body they shared.

And then, of course, there was the part where for years, even those times she’d been alone, she hadn’t been.

She hadn’t actively known Maddie was here, not until she’d started dying again, not until the resurrection machine and the power struggle for control of her body. Unlike her previous resurrections, the process by which the Five reconstructed her was impartial: she was not being resurrected as Jean Grey, not really. She was being resurrected from her DNA, which was as much Madelyne’s as her own, and everything that existed in her mind at the time of her death, recorded and stored in Xavier, in Cerebro. 

_It’s your head,_ Emma had said. _Always._

But what of her was her, anymore? What of her was Madelyne, pushing out at the walls of this place and hoping some of her impulses, some of her desires, some of her fury, would reach the surface of Jean’s mind, far above?

She stopped pacing, closing her mental eyes. It didn’t actually do anything to limit her sight—she still knew precisely where every scrap of constructed object was, in the cabin and beyond. But it helped to center her, let go of the body she’d crafted, spin herself down small and thin and expand herself at once. She imagined her mind as fabric so thin as to be transparent, stretched tight, let it settle over everything in the cabin and pull taught like skin over too many bones. And then, quietly, almost like an afterthought, she pushed a single thread of herself up through the ceiling, through the roaring blue of the sky, and opened her eyes.

Madelyne was sitting across the table from Cable, her hands folded in front of her, in front of them. When she spoke, it reverberated around and through Jean’s thread-self, like being caught in the blast of one of Theresa or Sean’s screams, but without the pain—just the pure force of it, the weight of personality that Jean wasn’t, here, couldn’t be without being detected. “Christopher,” she said.

Cable’s jaw tightened. “It’s Nathan,” he said. “Nate, sometimes. From some people.”

Madelyne gave a little sigh, the wind through an alpine forest. “Nathan, then,” she said. “For now.”

Cable crossed his arms. “What do you want, Ms. Pryor?”

Jean felt Madelyne swallow, saw her hands twist around each other. “To see you,” she said. “To know you. Can you understand that?”

A long silence, and in it Jean slipped, a little, lost some of her clarity of vision and hearing. She concentrated, wound herself smaller, surfaced again to hear Cable’s harsh, “—don’t know why you expect anything else from me.”

Rage rose around Jean like a boiling sea, but it wasn’t just Madelyne’s rage. She wasn’t sure how she could tell, but there was something else under it. Some foreign malignancy, a gnawing, hungry thing hidden under the waves.

“You arrogant little _worm,_ ” Madelyne snapped, spitting her own bitterness and that of whatever else was here through Jean and out into the room. “What gives you the right to deny me? I am your _mother!”_

Jean saw Cable push himself back from the table in alarm, wondered what Madelyne looked like from the outside, if they could feel the anger pouring off of her in waves. She hesitated, caught a glimpse of Emma pushing through the door to intervene, and then made a choice, diving down, down into Madelyne’s mind, following the source of the _other._

+

Cable jumped back from the table with a shout, and Emma flung herself into the room. She’d wanted to give them some privacy—she could still hear them, of course, was still keeping an eye on them, but at least the illusion of such. But she’d known something was off as soon as Maddie laid eyes on the kid, a tremble to her hands, a desperation to her movements, like something was rising in her she didn’t expect.

And as soon as Cable had said anything she didn’t want to hear...

Maddie flung out a hand. Emma braced herself, expecting whatever painful pisonics Rachel had suffered, but nothing came, and she realized Maddie’s palm was open, not crooked in arcane gesture. A warning, not an attack. “S-stay back,” Maddie panted, her other hand fisted in her hair, sweat pouring down her face. “I can’t—”

 _What’s wrong with her?_ Cable demanded. _She feels—wrong._

 _I don’t know,_ Emma shot back. _Help me._

Nathan’s grip on her mind was much clumsier than Rachel’s and nothing close to the satisfying clasp of Jean’s, they’d never practiced this, but he got there, his _quiet!_ a single efficient bullet of command wrapped in the diamond of Emma’s strength. Madelyne slumped, her eyelids fluttering, but not entirely out, and Emma managed to catch her before she hit the floor.

“Hurts,” Maddie mumbled through whitened lips. “Hurts, hurts, wants to hurt—”

“Shh,” said Emma, smoothing her hair back. “Shh, just, let me—”

She tried not to feel strange about how much easier it was, this time, to slip into the confines of Madelyne’s mind.

She arrived to find Jean on the front porch of the cabin, seated at a wooden chess table that she was certain hadn’t been there last time she was here. The winds were still hissing across the mountainside, but the sun had come out, burning white and distant in the pale blue sky.

“What’s this?” Emma asked, disconcerted. “Madelyne collapses in my sitting room, she might be _dying_ , and you’ve decided this is the time to teach yourself chess?” She crossed her arms, pointedly ignoring the seat across the table. “What, are we roleplaying as Erik and Charles today?”

“You even wore white,” Jean pointed out, and then her own clothes shimmered into sleek black.

Emma made a face. “Too modern, surely. If we’re adversaries here, shouldn’t it be more like this?” 

She concentrated, and her suit blossomed with pink and purple ink, hardening to metal, a cape sprouting from her shoulders. Her thigh-length boots and opera gloves remained the same other than color, though. The Master of Magnetism had always had a sartorial sense, even if it was a rather garish one.

She topped it off with a squarish crown framing her face, more like Erik’s much-maligned daughter than the man himself—helmets and her hairstyle didn’t mix.

Jean laughed and waved a hand at her, her nose scrunched up in distaste. “Ew, no, too weird! Too weird! Go back!”

Emma let go, and her outfit settled back to its default white. 

“Are we adversaries, then?” Jean asked, gesturing her again to the seat. “I thought I’d talked you around, last time.”

Emma took it, grudgingly, annoyed that Jean had so effectively derailed her. “You talked me into leaving,” she countered. “And now I’m back.”

“So you are,” said Jean. “But if I’d asked you last time, I think you’d say Madelyne dying was a boon to our situation.” She moved a pawn two spaces forward on the board.

“I—” Emma stared at the board, weighing her own pawn in her hand. “If I accept the premise you’ve laid out, then she deserves to live, and that includes the people around her—me—making every effort to ensure she does.”

Jean propped her chin on her hand. “And if you don’t accept it?”

Emma placed her pawn on the board. “Then I should go back out and kill her myself.” She held Jean’s eyes. “Neither plan involves watching her die, slowly and painfully, of a preventable cause.”

Jean moved a pawn. “What makes you think it’s preventable?”

Emma stared at her, frustration rising, moving her own pawn to match. “ _You,_ ” she said. “Whatever’s going on with her, it’s in here—I don’t know if it’s some kind of possession or corruption or what—”

Jean shook her head sharply. “Addiction.”

Emma blinked. “What?”

“Addiction,” Jean said. “Whatever happened to her in Limbo, whatever the demons gave her to bolster her power, she’s addicted to it. When she was just dormant in my mind it didn’t have anything to affect, any chemicals to twist or meat to burrow into, but now—she’s going through withdrawal.”

“Withdrawal,” Emma echoed. “From magic?”

“From Limbo magic, specifically,” Jean said, and moved a piece on the board. 

Emma blinked at it. “You can’t move a knight like that.”

“Really?” Jean asked, looking down. “Sorry, like you said. Don’t really know how to play.” She sat back. “I also can’t do anything about the withdrawal from in here. If she were still high on magic, maybe I could suppress that, but.” She shook her head. “I saw it, Emma. A great gnawing emptiness that something used to fill, right at the heart of her. It’s trying to heal itself, but it just produces rage like bile. Eventually it will eat through her entirely.

Emma resisted a dramatic urge to overturn the chessboard. “So she’ll die. While you sit here, pretending to play chess.”

Jean folded her hands. “Yes,” she said. “Unless you find another way.” Her eyebrows drew together. “I would prefer you find another way.”

Emma closed her eyes, took a long breath in through her nose. “I am not a patient woman,” she said slowly, “and you are testing every moment of my nerve.”

“It’s good to learn new skills,” Jean said placidly, and when Emma glared at her she grinned wide.

“There are no words for the things you’ll owe me when this is all over,” Emma said, standing up. “No limits to what I’ll demand.”

“What’s mine is yours.” Jean blinked slow at her, and Emma suddenly felt exposed, obvious, _known_ in a way that she both hated and suddenly longed for, her breath catching in her throat. She furiously reinforced her shields like the metaphorical man placing tracks in front of a speeding train.

“Oh, by the way," Jean said, as she turned to go. "I died in the middle of making a short joke about Wolverine, will you pass it on for me?"

Emma rolled her eyes. "Depends. Is it funny?"

Jean cocked her head, her long red locks gleaming in the mental sunlight. "It's about death, so yes, if you've got a morbid sense of humor." She grinned. "I was thinking about how much I've died, and how much Logan has died, and how if that's the bar for riding the Scott Summers train it's much easier for him to pass than if it had a height requirement. Like at an amusement park."

Emma stared at her.

Jean's smile faded. "Not funny?"

"Your complete lack of ability to deliver a joke is almost charming,” said Emma. “Did you even tell it, or were you too caught up in explaining it?"

Jean blinked at her, looking faintly puzzled. "There's a difference?"

Caught off guard, Emma laughed.

"See," said Jean, smug and not bothering to hide it, "my humor's more situational."

Emma shook her head. "Yes, darling, I'm sure I would have found your first joke hilarious had you told it while bleeding out all over my Chanel suit." She tucked her hair behind her ear. "Though it fails, in premise, because you're not accounting for a simple fact."

Jean raised her eyebrows at her. 

"I've never died," said Emma. Even now, even here, inside someone else's head on an island designed to defang death entirely, it felt like a bad omen.

Jean's smile was back, small and amused. "Why, Emma," she said. "Haven't you always been the exception to prove the rule?"

+

"She's in space," Kate said, pulling one of her legs up into her chest.

Emma sat back in her chair, narrowing her eyes. "I thought you two were—" _soulmates,_ she almost said, but thought better of it, though Kate had thrown around the term herself in other days. "Connected."

Kate shrugged. "Sure," she said. "Our souls, and kind of our bodies, I guess. Like, I'll know if she dies out there, and sometimes I can feel, like, her pain, and." She blushed, gnawing on her lip. "But it's not like a phone, I can't just summon her up."

Emma sighed. "A shame." She picked up her wine glass. "Even if I were bolstering your connection, telepathically?"

"It’s possible," Kate said slowly, sensing the seriousness behind her questions. "I guess it depends how far out they are." She sat forward, picking up the bottle from the table between them. "What's this about, Emma?"

Emma thought carefully. "I have reason to believe that there's a threat to her control over Limbo," she said, "and I need her help."

Kate’s eyebrows shot up. “An immediate threat? We can’t wait for them to place their flower with Sam and Izzy?”

“I don’t know,” Emma said truthfully. “I would prefer not to risk it.”

Kate gnawed on her lip. “Okay,” she said. “Fine. Let’s try.”

She poured herself a glass of wine, first, and drank it down in one long swallow. Emma couldn’t exactly judge the need for some liquid courage without being a hypocrite, but she made a mental note to keep an eye on Kate’s drinking anyway. The Marauders often reclaimed shipments of wine and liquor, and Emma suspected not all of it ended up in the communal stockpiles.

“Okay,” Kate said again, and crossed her legs, letting her hands hang loose on her knees. Emma leaned into her space, placing fingertips at her temples. It didn’t technically help anything, but she found it made people feel better to imagine she couldn’t just piggyback on their brains at distance whenever she wanted, and she felt Kate relax under her hands. 

And then she made some kind of disorienting internal _twist_ that didn’t feel mental, but wasn’t physical, either—a twist of something between the two, and there was a roaring in Emma’s ears, and then a sudden squirming echo of laughter and all of Emma flashed hot. There were smooth thighs under her hands, wet heat beneath her tongue, her mind filled with determination and need.

Distantly, Kate gasped, ragged and breathless.

Emma disentangled herself carefully from their minds-become-one. “ _Illyana_ ,” she said, both aloud and through their welded-together mind-link.

The Illyana-mind startled, picking up her head. “Emma? What—I—Kitty?”

The owner of the thighs said something, the language incomprehensible but not unfamiliar, and Illyana snapped, “hang _on,_ one second—”

" _Apologies for the interruption_ ," Emma said coolly, " _but when you have a moment, we need to speak to you_."

"I—yeah, okay. I'll call you from the ship's computer," Illyana said hurriedly, and then the connection was snipped, as efficiently as if she'd taken a pair of scissors to it. Or perhaps more aptly, knowing her, a knife.

Kate was slumped, her head between her knees, and Emma worried for a moment that the severed cord had lashed back at her in some way, that Illyana had inadvertently damaged her, but then she said in a small voice, "she was with a girl."

 _Ah._ "Yes," said Emma simply. "Shi'ar, from the accent." And the brief impression of feathers.

Kate sat up, gathering her hair back up into her ponytail. "Okay," she said. "Right." Her cheeks were flushed. When Emma gave her a look, she raised a shoulder in defense. "I didn't know, that's all."

Emma wondered exactly what she didn't know—that Illyana had some kind of arrangement with an alien lover? Surely she wasn't pretending not to know of Illyana’s interest in women; even aside from how absurd that would be given their closeness, Emma could count on one hand the mutants on Krakoa who _didn't_ experience a significant degree of samesex attraction. She had often thought it would be a fruitful topic of research—the comorbidity of the x gene and whatever genetic factors fed into sexuality—though she was pretty sure her data-gathering methods would never pass IRB. Then again, did mutants technically count as ‘human subjects?’

She was broken from her musing by the _bleep_ of the communication system built into her desk. 

She crossed to it, giving Kate a questioning look, but Kate shook her head. Emma shrugged and called up the version of the communications screen that only showed her chair and none of the surrounds. “Rasputin.”

Illyana was fixing her bangs when she popped up. She’d barely bothered to get dressed, throwing what appeared to be a too-big Lilah Cheney band shirt over her black shorts. “What the hell was so damn important you coerced Kitty into strong-arming her way into my head?”

“She’s going by Kate now,” Emma reminded her.

“Doing a lot of things now,” Illyana said shortly, waiting.

 _As are you,_ Emma would have said, if she weren’t in fact strapped for time. Illyana was almost as fun to rile up as Rachel, though she and Emma got along better; Kate had a type. “Madelyne Pryor needs to access Limbo.”

There were a million in-between questions that anyone else would have asked, starting with _how is Madelyne even back,_ but Illyana Rasputin was not anyone else. “And you’re looking to _help_ her?” she demanded.

“I am,” said Emma.

“You said you were worried she’d _take over_ Limbo without ‘Yana there,” Kate objected from where she still sat, safely offscreen.

Emma tossed her a glance, amused. “I thought you didn’t want to be a part of this meeting.”

“I don’t,” Kate grumbled.

Emma looked back at Illyana, who was tugging at a strand of her hair. For a moment, before she saw Emma paying attention, she looked absolutely, heart-rendingly lost. An instant later her scowl had snapped back into place. “So spill,” she said. “Why help a demon sorceress get access to the source of her demon sorceress powers?”

“Because she’s addicted to them,” Emma explained. “She’s going through withdrawal.”

“Sounds like a problem that’ll sort itself out,” Kate muttered.

"I have some experience with drug users,” Emma said, ignoring Kate and her own looming, too-close memories of Christian’s hospitalization both. “I wouldn’t recommend going cold turkey even for addiction to a non-magical drug. For something like this...“ She shook her head. “We don’t have any idea what withdrawal from demonic magic looks like, and we don’t have the facilities to deal with what it might do to her.”

“And someone made this your problem,” Illyana said, “so you’re making it my problem.”

“ _I_ made it my problem,” Emma countered quietly, “and I am asking for your help.”

She expected Illyana to be surprised, but there was immediate understanding in her eyes, even if she immediately rolled them to hide it. “Right,” she said. “I’ll come home, we’ll bring her in. I have an idea for what she might need to get her hands on. We should only have to go in once.”

She hung up, almost as abrupt as she’d cut off their mental link.

Emma turned to look at Kate, who met her eyes only for a moment before looking away. 

“We,” said Emma.

“She didn’t mean me,” Kate said immediately. “I wasn’t even in the meeting.”

Emma stood up. “You have as much experience hopping in and out of Limbo with Illyana as anyone on the island,” she said. “More than most. You can wield her sword if necessary. It makes sense for you to come.”

Kate’s eyes snapped to hers. “You know how I found out I can wield her sword?”

Emma blinked at her, surprised at the fury in her eyes, the deep grief. She’d been expecting reluctance, remaining embarrassment, but not this. “What?”

“She died,” Kate said grimly. “In New York. Illyana died, sacrificed herself to seal Limbo after Madelyne tore it open, and suddenly her soul was, was _in_ me, suddenly I was the only one who could even _remember_ her.” She pushed herself to her feet. “I know she’s not the Madelyne you remember facing. I know you think she’s better, more human, because Scott thinks that and you believe Scott. But she’s not.” She grabbed the rest of the wine bottle and turned to go, not looking back at Emma. “And if she gets ‘Yana hurt again, I’ll never fucking forgive you.”

She walked away. Emma thought about calling after her, telling her she had it wrong, she didn’t believe Madelyne was better because of Scott—that she’d tried as hard as she could to keep Scott free of this whole process, to keep Madelyne free of _him._ That she only believed Madelyne was better than the cackling fragment of malicious energy she’d faced before because _Jean_ believed it, and Emma wanted to believe what Jean believed with a desperation that almost scared her. She thought about taking the bottle back from Kate’s hand, insisting she stay, thought about coercing—as Illyana had put it—her into explaining what had gone wrong between the two of them. Opening up to her trusted confidant, her Red Queen, about what was going wrong with _her,_ the way she felt split in half, a bundle of conflicting hopes and desires.

She snorted to herself, and let Kate go. 

She took a quick look in on Madelyne—she was curled into a tight ball in the center of the bed, pulsing with pain and power, and Emma didn’t need to see the sigils on her wrists to know they’d be squirming and shifting, but, it appeared, holding—for now. She crossed the hall and closed the door of her own bedroom behind her, leaning on it for a moment. She felt—strange. Off-kilter, an itch under her skin. Even with teleporting through Limbo, it would be a while before Illayan was able to extricate herself from the other New Mutants and make her way back to earth.

Emma was a patient person. But that didn’t mean she _liked_ to wait, just that she was good at finding ways to fill time. And there was a lingering hunger at the back of her mind, a lingering phantom taste in her mouth.

She stripped off her jacket and lay down on her bed, letting her eyes slip closed, conjuring up the memory of those smooth, strong thighs, no name attached. No baggage. 

It had been a long time since she’d eaten anyone out. Too long. She missed it, the power of it, the way everyone needed it differently, the way every time you began you were learning anew, each motion of tongue and lips that drew a moan or a shudder a new key in an incredibly enjoyable lock. The _taste_ of it, the heat. She slid her hands over her stomach, ran her nails upward to tweak her nipple hard through her bra, imagining other hands, other fingers sliding up the side of her face and gripping her hair. She let herself build the image-body further, strong pale thighs on either side of a perfect pussy, dripping in the wake of her mouth. A neatly trimmed bush, dark brown—no, a deep red. Long-fingered hands in her hair. She looked up across miles of lightly-freckled skin into Jean’s face, her mouth curled and open in something half-gasp, half-smirk, her green eyes sparking gold.

Emma froze with one hand slid into her underwear. She double-checked the mental wards she always put up before sex, making sure this was, in fact, constructed fantasy and not somehow Jean herself, conjured here from Madelyne’s mind across the hall. But her walls were strong, untouched, and her mental Jean shifted her legs on either side of Emma’s head, working her lower lip between her teeth. _Emma,_ she said. _Please._

“Fuck it,” Emma murmured, and imagined herself leaning up and fastening her mouth around Jean’s clit.

She wouldn’t beg. That wasn’t her style; to Jean, _please_ was not some pathetic admission of vulnerability, of need, but a marker that she meant what she said, a polite precursor to a command. Please, listen. Please, do as I say. Please, please me. And Emma would—god, Emma would blow her fucking mind, if given the opportunity, would fuck Jean with her tongue til she screamed from it. Scott was decent with his mouth, thanks to her coaching, but there were tricks she’d never let him in on, and if Jean let her into her mind, let Emma see what she wanted, what she needed, what she was desperate for without ever having to put it into words— _fuck._

Emma ground her clit against her fingers, imagining that perfect telepathic feedback loop, impulses shifting hot through her whole body, sensations overlapping impossibly. Jean was riding her face and kissing her at once and her fingers were slipping inside Emma alongside her own, and Emma was twisting her fingers into Jean, and, god, she was so wet, it had been so long since she’d _had_ this, this total sexual and telepathic connection, it had been—only once—

Her eyes flew open. “Astrid,” she gasped, and then she came.

For a moment—a rolling, back-arching, world-blackening moment—she thought she heard distant laughter. 

And then it was gone, and she was lying in bed in the silence, still nearly fully dressed, her underwear and probably her slacks ruined, her face—impossible though it seemed—dry.

She ran a hand over it anyway, and stood on shaking legs to stumble her way to the shower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all remember Astrid, right?? From Emma's 2003 solo that no one read bc the covers all looked [like](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531996909l/40872635._SY475_.jpg) [this](https://i.annihil.us/u/prod/marvel/i/mg/c/c0/5e289e2b9f0db/clean.jpg) even though she was in high school/college for the entire thing? Yeah. Anyway Astrid is Emma's college "friend" (cough girlfriend cough) whose brain she broke in revenge for some bullshit about her high school teacher she was in love with. She was also a telepath, and she was British, and it's my headcanon (if not implied canon) that Emma started speaking with an accent after pulling her mind out of her head like taffy.
> 
> As you can tell, I'm officially Ignoring every Madelyne appearance since Inferno. Just don't need 'em.
> 
> There's another chapter of this.... definitely just one more though! it is 90% written, just mostly needs editing and should be up by the end of the week.
> 
> Thank you all for your patience, I hope you enjoy!!


	3. Chapter 3

If Ilyana noticed she’d showered and changed by the time she arrived to the White Palace she didn’t say anything—it helped to cultivate a truthful reputation as a clothes-horse, and Emma would probably have changed anyway, her snow-white ensemble not exactly suitable for the grime and soot and eldritch _mess_ of Limbo. She opted for a look Illyana would appreciate, a sleek black bodysuit and tall black boots, the only acknowledgement of her White Queen status a necklace of triangular mother-of-pearl plates hanging from her throat down over her breasts and around her ribs like a breastplate of deeply impractical scale-mail. She’d also retrieved one of the knives from her wardrobe and strapped it to her thigh. 

“We’ll need a team,” Illyana said. “We can keep it small, but you’re going to have to keep an eye on Madelyne, and I want someone watching my back in there.” She shrugged a shoulder at Emma’s enquiring look. “Sure, I technically run the place, but it’s still _Hell_.”

“Rachel,” said Emma immediately. “If that works for you. She’s the only other one who really knows what’s going on with Jean.” 

Illyana gave her a look, eyebrows raised. “With Madelyne _and_ Jean,” Emma corrected. “It’s—complicated.”

“Sure,” said Illyana, sounding like she couldn’t be less interested. If Emma had been someone else, she would have accepted it at face value. Honestly, if she’d been herself a few hours ago, before Kate had told her about Illyana’s martyrdom, she still might have accepted it at face value. But now she looked deeper, slid a mental hand over the uneasy surface of Illyana’s mind, saw the slight bloodlessness to the grip on her sword’s hilt. She was scared.

Emma had known Illyana a long time, and could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen her scared.

“Go on then,” Illyana said, voice still bored. “Call Prestige, and we’ll get this over with.”

“Not without me,” Kate said, stepping through the wall. Emma turned to her, surprised. She’d assumed Kate had left on the Marauder, or at least holed up on it to drink her anger away. But she was still holding the wine-bottle, and when she placed it back on Emma’s desk it sloshed, hardly emptier than when she’d taken it. “Sorry,” she said softly.

Emma waved the apology away, pretty certain it wasn’t warranted. _Rachel,_ she said, _we’ve got a job._

Rachel sent her a ping of acknowledgment—Emma was briefly aware of what looked like a pool table, and young Cable making a face, and then it was gone.

“She’s on her way,” she said brightly into the absolutely suffocating silence stretching between the other women. 

“So where is she?” Illyana asked, looking around, as if she expected Rachel to pop out of a wall like Kate had. And then Emma caught the dark flash of internal bravado, and realized she hadn’t meant Rachel at all.

“She’s in the guest room,” she said. Maddie had been awake, but staring at nothing the last time Emma had looked in on her. She hadn’t seemed to see her at all; the only motion to her was her endlessly twisting hands, rotating again and again at the wrists as if twisting against invisible shackles. Perhaps Seline had done as asked after all.

“Bring her out, if you can?” Illyana asked.

Emma nodded. It took some maneuvering—Maddie was still nothing like _responsive,_ but she allowed Emma to pull her to her feet and deposit her on one of the chairs in the office, facing the desk.

Rachel arrived as Emma was stepping back from Maddie. She stopped in the doorway, looking at Emma, then Kate, then finally Illyana. “What’s going on?”

“Short version,” said Illyana, “we’re going to Limbo to get the Goblin Queen here her mojo back.”

“A very small amount of her mojo,” Emma corrected, “to be administered to her in controlled doses in order to wean her off her need for mojo at all.”

Rachel stared at her. “And this is a _good_ idea?”

“No,” said Kate.

“Yes,” said Emma.

“Who can tell?” asked Illyana.

Rachel shook her head with a little sigh. “Good enough, I suppose.” She gave Emma a nod. “I’m in.”

Illyana looked sideways at Kate, who was studiously not looking back. “Right,” she said. “You got some kind of fancy map doohickey I can use?”

Emma sighed and called the display up on her desk, a horizontal field of blue light able to be manipulated into peaks and valleys . “I have no maps of Limbo, though. Perhaps we should… once we’ve ironed out the wrinkles involved in nation-building, that’s a project worth pursuing.”

“No need,” said Illyana. “I know it like the back of my hand.”

Emma looked at her sharply. “And if we should need to explore it when you’re not around?”

Illyana shrugged. “You just called me back from _space._ Nobody can _die_ anymore. I don’t think that’s a concern.”

“You never did learn to share,” said Rachel. 

The look Illyana shot her would’ve killed a lesser woman on the spot. Emma raised her eyebrows.

“Ray,” said Kate, tone reproachful.

Emma fully intended to take a step back and let whatever was going on here play itself out—what was a mission to save someone’s life without a little interpersonal drama first, after all—but Illyana was all business, reaching out to thread her fingers through the blue lines of the map. She manipulated it less like she was drawing, as Emma usually did, and more like a child playing cat’s cradle, stretching space between her fingers and dropping loops of it away again when they weren’t quite right. Her eyes were narrowed, like she was searching; creating patterns on patterns until she found the right one.

Finally she stopped, pulling her hands back, and the shape hanging above Emma’s desk wasn’t a map at all. It was a three-dimensional rendering of a fountain, rough-hewn from stone, nestled into the side of a mountain. Stringy, unpleasant-looking trees clung to the cliffs above and around it.

“There are many sources of magic in Limbo,” Illyana explained. “Some of them more potent than others, some of them more contested by local factions. This isn’t really either. The actual _source_ is below the mountain, in a cave system controlled by demons still loyal to S’ym. But a long time ago some enterprising creature had an idea to tap the river that flowed through the source, basically feed off its second-hand enchantment from its brush with pure magic.”

In the rendering of the fountain, something moved—little figures pulling themselves up from the stone, throwing themselves down on the slimy moss at the edge of the fountain to drink greedily. Illyana’s lip curled. She waved a hand at them, and they vanished into nothing.

Emma blinked. Her map shouldn’t be able to do that.

“There might be a few stragglers, minor imps who can’t get anything better, but nothing we can’t handle,” Illyana continued dismissively. “So long as we get in, bottle up some of the water, and get out without attracting the notice of the demons below we should be fine.”

“This water,” Rachel said. “There’s enough sorcery in the water for it to be effective?”

Illyana smirked. “When I say it’s not potent, I mean in comparison to other magicks in Limbo,” she said. “Still stronger than almost anything ever brought to this realm, other than me and mine.”

“Illyana,” Kate said quietly. “You’re from this realm.”

Illyana ignored her, turning to Emma. “You got any bottles? Glass might do in a pinch but diamond would be better. It might eat through glass.”

Emma gave a theatrical sigh. “I guess I can sacrifice some perfume for the cause.”

Kate raised her eyebrows at her. “I thought bottles for perfume were just, like, diamond-shaped, not actual diamond.”

“Not if you get them as a personal gift from Gaultier, darling,” Emma called, leaving the room to—not without a pang—pour her two and a half bottles of _Classique_ down the sink. When she returned, Illyana had already cast a stepping-circle in the middle of Emma’s floor, and Rachel was pulling an unresisting Maddie to her feet. 

Emma widened her psychic net out to include everyone but Maddie. _Be ready to intervene if necessary, I'm lengthening her leash,_ she said, and then relaxed the mental bindings she’d wrapped Madelyne in a panic when she’d first collapsed, enough to allow her to have her wits about her.

"Use a different metaphor, please," Rachel ground out.

"Relax, no one's going to be getting any face tattoos on my watch. Kate’s, on the other hand…"

“Pyro makes his own stupid decisions,” Kate muttered. “Repeatedly.”

“Ready?” Illyana asked.

Emma took stock of everyone’s mental state; Kate disapproving but determined, Rachel braced but hopeful, Maddie a turmoil of hunger clamped down under an almost frightening calm. “Yes,” she said, and stepped through Illyana’s portal.

Limbo looked different every time she entered it, but it always _felt_ the same: at once unnervingly cold and damp and searingly hot against her mind, against her skin. A skittering of claws at the back of her neck like the first moments of fear made physical. 

They were in the bottom of a canyon, the red-brown walls rising high to either side. Emma fancied she could feel the ghost of the river that had carved out this notch of earth, rushing force passing through and over the place she now stood, for years and years, years and years ago. Eroding the stone beneath her. Eroding the diamond of her flesh.

A sun burned balefully far above, and for a moment, Emma miscounted shadows. 

Illyana was ahead of her, her sword in her hand, and Kate had drifted up to stand with her, whether intentionally or from the force of long habit Emma had no idea. When she glanced backward she saw Rachel supporting a barely-conscious Madelyne, and. Beyond them, in the shade of the canyon wall, just for a split second, someone else. 

A curved, knowing smile. Long dreadlocks pulled back from a face Emma had once credited with teaching her a new kind of pride—pride in herself as a mutant, as a telepath; pride in being something beyond human. 

“Astrid,” she said. “How—”

But the figure was gone, and Rachel was staring at her. “What?

Emma frowned, shaking herself. “I thought I saw someone,” she said. “But she’s dead.”

“So were half the people I hang out with on a daily basis,” Rachel pointed out. 

“She hasn’t been brought back,” Emma said shortly. “She can’t be. Her mind died long before her body did.” 

Rachel opened her mouth to argue, to ask further questions, and Emma rolled her eyes. “I killed her, Prestige. You understand?”

Rachel closed her mouth. _Yes,_ she said, her mental voice a fascinating mix of judgement and sympathy. _I do._

 _Good,_ said Emma, with no emotion at all. “Let’s get on with this, shall we?” she called, turning back toward Illyana and Kate. 

“Keep your eyes open,” Illyana responded. “Something felt us bring _her_ here.” Her tone left no doubt as to who she meant. “I don’t know what, but I’d prefer not to find out.”

Rachel switched from holding Madelyne physically up to telekinetically, and then apparently decided she was too impatient for that and lifted all of them at once, propelling them quickly down the center of the canyon until they reached its tapering end at the base of a high, craggy peak of a shining blue-black stone.

There, indeed, was the fountain, looking exactly as it had in Illyana’s reconstruction, though now in sickly color. The water was so murky as to be almost pitch-black, the moss around it an ominous red-brown like dried blood. It smelled foul, so foul Emma sent a silent apology to good old Gaultier for replacing his rather divine scent with someone so infernal.

She stepped forward, and bent to fill the first bottle.

As soon as the diamond touched the water Maddie gasped, loud in the waiting silence, and Rachel gave a short cry, pain lancing through the open telepathic channel Emma had established between them all. Maddie, Kate, and Illyana, who had still been suspended in her telekinetic grasp, tumbled to the ground. The moment Madelyne’s feet touched the moss, something _roared_.

“Fuck,” said Illyana.

The mountain shifted, a row of jagged outcroppings groaning and creaking until they came free, swishing and curling in the air, two more sections of earth lifting free with a small landslide of dirt and shale and unfolding into wings. The dragon roared again, this time its head starkly visible against the distant angry sun, its scales as dark as a silhouette, its teeth white bone stained yellow.

“You said there might be _minor demons,_ ” Kate snapped, her physical voice lost in the sudden blustering of wind emanating from the dragon’s wings but her words clear in all of their heads. “That the things loyal to S’ym were all underground—”

“I didn’t think about the things loyal to _her,_ ” Illyana shouted back, leaping to a higher vantage, her grip shifting on her sword. “I’ve never even _met_ most of the things loyal to _her_ , I was dead!”

Her. Madelyne, the Goblin Queen, her eyes rolled back in her head to show pure white, her scarlet hair huge and moving in a wind all its own—was revolving slowly in place like a ballerina in a music box. Her feet were hovering just above the moss, the toes of her boots stained with what Emma was suddenly certain didn’t just _look_ like dried blood, but _was_ dried blood, and suddenly they weren’t the practical hiking boots she’d chosen from Emma’s closet anymore, but tall black stilettos, her cashmere sweater giving way to a nearly-bare chest and a flapping black cloak clasped at her throat with a golden brooch. She raised a hand, moving unnaturally, a puppet and puppeteer at once.

The dragon descended, wings scraping and shattering against the canyon walls, to lay its massive head against her palm. Rachel was pushing herself to her feet as one massive claw descended on her, and Kate threw herself forward, wrapping a hand around her ankle just as it would have crushed her flat. She dragged her out of the way, moving as easily through scale and stone as she did through open air.

Emma kept her telepathic connection with everyone wide open, but continued to dedicate most of her attention to filling the bottle in her hands. It seemed to want her to drop it, the viscous water of the fountain grasping at her fingers—also diamond; she was no fool—and fighting her efforts to coax it down the bottle’s throat. It filled, but slow, too slow. She disliked that the _Classique_ bottle was shaped like the torso of a woman; with Madelyne at her back the metaphor felt almost too pointed.

 _Why did we even bring her here?_ Rachel demanded, to her and to the others. _Look at her!_

Emma didn’t. She didn’t have to; every time one of her friends spoke they sent her a momentary glimpse through their eyes. The Goblin Queen was doing something to the air around them, the stench of the fountain in front of her almost drowned out by a scent of ozone, of the sky before a storm. Everywhere there were little pops and gasps, like arc-lightning, like the crack of bones.

 _We wanted to give her her mojo back, right?_ Illyana demanded. She leapt, driving her sword through the foot that Kate and Rachel had just left. The dragon and Madelyne both screamed, and the dragon snaked its head around to snap its gnashing teeth at her. She flipped easily out of the way. _I’d call this back!_

 _I wanted to bring her,_ Emma said, realizing it was true. _I wanted to remind her what she was._

 _Why?_ Kate demanded. Through her eyes Emma saw her pick her way closer to the too-still figure of Madelyne, the snapping jaws of the dragon. Illyana teleported over to its other side, lopping off a claw, distracting it.

Emma capped the first perfume bottle and pulled out a second. _So she knows she can be more._

“This isn’t Lockheed, Kitty,” Illyana snapped aloud, and then, internally, _Ray, can you do something about—_

 _I’m trying,_ Rachel thought through gritted teeth. _Shut up._

She closed herself out of their mental link.

Emma sent a mental nudge and received permission to see through Illyana’s eyes: Rachel, hovering directly above Madelyne, her arms stretched downward, her hands tensed like she was gripping something. Kitty standing far too close to the enormous head of the dragon, moving slowly backwards, murmuring, “come on, yeah, that’s right, look at me,” words that barely registered in her mind because there was no meaning to them, the thought behind them a repetitive, determined _follow follow follow follow._

Illyana, her sword bloodied, waiting, watching, as Kitty picked her way through a minefield of glittering, snapping lightning.

Rachel gave a cry like some kind of inhuman hawk and twisted her hands, and Madelyne howled in fury. All of the lightning scattered and building across the canyon floor arced inward at Rachel, who attempted to deflect it with a furious combination of telekineses and the brute force of her arms. Electricity crackled across her skin. It must have hurt like hell, but she showed no sign of it, her teeth gritted against the heavy, shifting air.

At the same time, the dragon lunged at Kitty, neck outstretched, jaws smug and wide, and she grinned as they closed on her. Satisfaction poured from Illyana’s mind as she threw herself upward and brought her soulsword in a shining arc down into its throat.

The creature screamed, but Madelyne was undeterred, all of her malice focused now on Rachel. She stalked up to her on open air, reaching out a black-gloved hand. Rachel twisted out of the way, grabbing her wrist, and for a moment they were a strange pair, green eyes locked, Rachel a short-haired muscular take two of this being of hatred and helplessness. Emma nudged at her mind, too, but couldn’t get in; either Rachel still wanted this fight to be hers, or she had no attention to spare.

Emma capped her second bottle of perfume and began on the third.

“Emma,” said someone, aloud, very close to her left ear.

She spun, letting go of Illyana’s point of view in order to snap back into her own. The rocky hollow around the fountain was empty. She closed her eyes, breathing in. _No one there,_ she told herself firmly. An enchanted landscape getting its hooks into her, playing up the same lingering ghosts that had been plaguing her of late. Opportunistic.

She opened her eyes to see the water of the pool spiraling up the diamond of her arm, tendrils of sludge curling around her elbow. Her hand, and the bottle, was already entirely submerged.

She cursed and tried to pull herself free, but the water gripped her, impossibly, the fluid moving like muscle, until she snarled and snapped her other hand out, palm and fingers flat, striking her elbow at the joint hard enough to shatter. There was no pain—there wouldn’t be, until she returned to her flesh form—but it was a disconcerting sensation, control and then none, as her forearm and hand fell free of her bicep. The diamond limb fell into the pool with a splash, splattering the creeping water as if in surprise, and Emma grabbed for it, tugging it free—bottle still clamped in her frozen fingers—before the magic in the pool could pull it down to the depths forever. She didn’t relish the idea of leaving anything of herself in this place.

Behind her, the sound of metal rending meat, and the dragon’s cries abruptly stopped. When Emma turned, tucking the third bottle in with the other two in the hidden pocket against her thigh, Illyana had one foot up on the ridge of the dragon’s eye. She was cleaning her sword with a silvery cloth, ignoring the oil-slick blood spattered up her side. The gap between the dragon’s head and the rest of its neck was wide enough for Kate to walk through it without phasing.

A few yards away, Rachel had Madelyne on her knees, her wrist bent painfully backward, gold-red spectral flames flickering around her face and head like a crown, or perhaps a muzzle. Emma crossed to her, politely excusing herself from the telepathic group-chat for a moment and allowing her mind to approach the whirling maelstrom of the Goblin Queen.

 _Madelyne,_ she said, sending with it the almost-camaraderie of her kitchen, the feeling of relief she’d caught when she told her she could see Cable. Vulnerability, cunning, humanity. _Come back._

Madelyne swore in some infernal tongue and struck out at Rachel’s cage, scattering mental and physical sparks. 

Emma kept walking. _Come back,_ she said again. _What are you hungry for? There is nothing for you here._ She handed her arm to Kate, who took it, and then saw what it was and nearly dropped it. 

“Emma, what the hell—”

Emma ignored her. _You know who you are,_ she said silently. _Who you were. The real you, practical, loving, cynical, skilled. You can be her again, only real this time. That’s what we’re offering you. That, itself, is power._

She reached Maddie’s physical body, raised the fingers of her remaining hand to touch her jaw. _Come back, and it’s yours._

For a moment she thought Madelyne might try to bite her fingers off—there was a wildness in her, an unthinking rage. If she had she would have had to figure out how to fix the poor woman’s teeth. But she calmed, blinked, stilled. Emma slid her hand forward to fully cup her cheek, wondering idly if it was warm, and Maddie’s eyes slid shut.

Rachel released her wrist, and by the time she’d slumped to the ground her Goblin Queen outfit had faded, leaving her once again in grey and khaki.

Illyana pushed her hair back from her face, ignoring the streaks of blood the gesture left behind. “Right,” she said. “Let’s go home before anything else notices us.”

+

Emma watched the Madelyne’s face go slack as the sorcery in the water took hold, found herself moving automatically to check her breathing, tuck her hair behind her ears. Kate, Rachel, and Illyana had vanished through one of Illyana’s transportation circles pretty much as soon as Madelyne had been deposited on Emma’s couch, Emma catching Kate’s muttered, “no, we’re _talking_ about this now,” just before they disappeared. It was a relief, to be alone again, even if she couldn’t come down completely from that terrible place until she was whole and could return herself to flesh.

The frenzied motion of Madelyne’s eyes behind her lids calmed, and her lashes finally lifted. 

Emma sat back immediately, letting her remaining hand rest in her lap.

“Emma,” Maddie breathed, and just for a moment Emma could swear she was Jean. 

“Good morning,” she said coolly. “How do you feel?”

Madelyne blinked again, her eyes moving over Emma’s diamond face, then to her side. “Your arm—”

Emma shrugged.

Madelyne sat up, running a hand over her face. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

 _Neither do I,_ Emma almost said, but it wasn’t really true. She stood up, crossing to the liquor cabinet to pour herself a drink. “Do you know what Krakoa is? Not the island itself, the idea.”

Madelyne watched her. The marks were gone from her wrists; presumably the sorcery in Limbo had been too strong for whatever paltry holds Selene had placed on her. Emma found she wasn’t as worried about that as she maybe she should have been. “A family,” Madelyne said. “A community. Safety.”

Emma snorted. “Jean’s definition,” she said. “Not mine.” She finished her pour and replaced the wine bottle. “Mine is something more like,” she paused. “Self-determination.”

Maddie raised her eyebrows at her as she took a second wineglass from the cabinet and tipped the remainder of the Limbo water from the bottle. “What do you mean?”

“Have you heard the phrase ‘oppression is a distraction’?” Emma asked. “It sounds dismissive, but it’s not. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, all of these things distract the marginalized from the work of building their own life. If you’re constantly limited, victimized, opposed in your decision-making—or, more insidiously, if you are constantly called upon to defend yourself or speak about your own marginalization rather than your passion or perspective as a person—you have no time or space for the things you would be without those drains on your attention.” She crossed to Madelyne, handing her the wineglass. “What we are creating here is that time and space. Where mutants don’t have to be mutants in the externally-mandated sense, just the internal. Where we don’t have to symbolize anything other than ourselves.”

Madelyne eyed the murky liquid in her wineglass suspiciously. “What is this stuff?”

Emma smiled thinly at her, perching on the arm of the couch. “Water from a fountain in Limbo. You don’t remember going?”

Maddie’s face stilled. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said quietly. “I have a lot of dreams about that place.”

Emma raised her eyebrows, interested. “Even before you took Jean’s body?” she asked.

Madelyne’s face didn’t move a muscle. Her eyes were darker than Jean’s, Emma thought, though that was impossible; maybe the Limbo water was doing something to her pupils. “There’s not much else to do _but_ dream, when I am not,” she shrugged, a jerky motion, “where I am now.”

Emma sipped her wine and waited.

Madelyne stared out across Emma’s sitting room and through the large window at the sea. “I never knew I was a mutant,” she said. “Not until I knew I was _her_. I never awoke to anything, not when I met Scott, not when I moved to Australia with the X-Men. I made myself useful, I was even given healing powers once by someone I met in Asgard, but none of it was _mine._ ” She glanced down at the glass in her hands. “I’m still not sure it is.”

“Jean wants you to have a place here,” Emma said quietly.

Maddie looked at her sharply. “What?”

“She wants you to have _her_ place here,” Emma continued, “to be more specific. Take her place on the Quiet Council, on X-Force, play out her role in our little pageant.”

Maddie’s hands tightened on her wineglass. “How—” she started, and then cut herself off, licking her lips. “Doesn’t matter. Just. The _fucking_ arrogance.”

Emma laughed. “I agree.” She crossed her legs, straightened the way her necklace was laying across her chest. “I’m not surprised you have no wish to step into such a role,” she said, not looking at Maddie. Not giving the next thought any external weight, though it was the factor that would determine a great many things. “What I don’t know is what you _do_ want.”

She saw Madelyne drink from the wineglass out of the corner of her eye, looked up casually to see her make a disgusted face. Pressed, just a little harder. “You’ve won something,” she said. “Taking her body from her. What is it?”

Maddie’s lips twisted. “Satisfaction,” she said. She met Emma’s eyes. “You strike me as a woman who can understand that.”

Emma inclined her head. “I am,” she said. “I also know it doesn’t last. Where do you go from here?”

“I don’t know,” Maddie said quietly. “I thought if I could get back to Limbo, consolidate my power there again, strike out—but.” She sipped again, winced, lowered the glass. “What’s the point? To hurt Scott? As if the world hasn’t taken its pound of flesh from him already?”

Emma felt herself relax, some tension somewhere easing. “I may have taken an ounce or two myself,” she admitted.

Maddie nodded. “You’ve hurt him,” she said. “But you loved him, too.”

“Yes,” said Emma simply. “I still do.”

Madelyne licked her lips. “I don’t,” she said bluntly. “Not anymore.” Her lips tightened, and with a shock Emma realized she was on the edge of tears. “You asked me what I want. I—I just want to rest, Emma. I want to go _home._ ”

Emma stood up. Maddie looked up at her, startled at the sudden movement, a single tear tracing its way down her cheek. Emma laid a hand on her shoulder. “Drink the rest of that,” she said quietly. “Tomorrow, if you begin to feel the effects again, I have more.”

Madelyne’s eyes tracked her across the room. “Where are you going?”

“To get my arm fixed,” Emma responded, and didn’t mention the rest.

+

Kurt Wagner met her outside Forge’s workshop just as she finished making sure all her joints still worked when they were flesh and not just crystal. 

“Walk with me,” she said, giving Forge a nod. He barely looked up from his tinkering. 

Kurt fell in beside her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

"The way I see it,” said Emma, dispensing with preamble, “there are maybe four people total on this island with any real reverence for religion. One of them is in space, probably howling at any moon she sees, and her faith has been used as a weapon against her far more than yours has against you."

Kurt inclined his head. "At the very least more effectively. You forget my father is quite literally a devil."

Emma hummed. "You know I'm not much for the whole 'sins of the father' thing."

Kurt laughed. " _Nein_ , I imagine not. I sold him my soul once, did you know? To my father, not your father, though I suppose the latter is just as possible."

Emma blinked at him, intrigued despite herself. "Really?"

Kurt nodded. "My friends were trapped. Logan was dying."

"He tends to get better," Emma pointed out.

"He was without powers at the time," Kurt explained. "No healing factor. Plus," he grinned. "I also got better."

Emma stopped, turning to him. "How?"

Kurt studied her. "What's this about? I can't imagine you've decided the time to find God is when you are firmly ensconced on a sex cult island."

Emma smiled. They'd been on opposing sides more often than not over the years, but it was very difficult not to like Kurt. "I thought we were a resurrection cult. I've _been_ in sex cults before, they're much less complicated."

Kurt shrugged. "Some people are in it for the resurrection, sure. Others…" he smirked, one eyebrow curving over a warm yellow eye.

Emma crossed her arms, and, not without regret, got down to business. "I'd like to know if you think it's possible to align a soul and a mind, separate from the body."

Kurt huffed a breath as if impressed. "Say more?"

Emma licked her lips. "Every time we create a cloned body," she said, "is it just a body, that then is overwritten with a mind? Or is the soul already attached? To what does the soul belong?"

Kurt drew himself up out of his crouch, rolling his shoulders back with a sigh. “I was worried about this.”

Emma raised her eyebrows and waited.

“Ever since we instituted the Crucible, I have been concerned about the resurrection protocols,” Kurt said, “and about the growing separation of _body_ from…” He paused, staring upward at the light filtering through the trees. “It is helpful to me, I think, to think of it as _das Selbst_ —the self, rather than the soul. Some combination of mind and spirit that makes us who we are.” He lowered his chin, regarding her knowingly. “You are wondering what would happen if you put it in a body not its own.”

“Not... exactly,” Emma said slowly. “It’s the only body she’s ever had. Whether or not that makes it hers seems to be up in the air right now.” She leaned back against a convenient loop of root. “What do you know about Madelyne Pryor?”

Kurt laughed. “That, I was not expecting.” He shook his head. “Not much—not of the person, anyway. I was away with Excalibur when she and Scott met, and didn’t rejoin the team until after the unpleasant business in New York. I met her only once, at Logan’s intended wedding to Mariko.” He ran a hand through his hair. “The most I can say is that I know she left her mark on Limbo—Amanda took over in the wake of Illyana’s death and Madelyne’s… absorption.” He made a face at his own choice of word.

“Partial absorption,” Emma corrected, also hating the mouthfeel of it. “My assumption was always that while Jean retained Madelyne’s memories, that extra aspect, that _self,_ died that day. Except, as you say, for the parts that remained in Limbo, waiting to spill out whenever we let our guard down.”

“But…?” prompted Kurt.

Emma crossed her arms. “We’ve recently discovered that some aspect of Madelyne survives, something more than just memory. Or perhaps we are all discovering that in some way, memory does equal selfhood—after all, isn’t memory the thing that Charles reinserts to make us _us_ again?”

Kurt rubbed the back of his neck. “I suppose,” he agreed uneasily. “Assuming that memory is the only thing a telepath stores, when extracting the self from the head. You would know that part far better than I.”

Emma shifted, uncomfortable, thinking about Astrid. Was the figure she’d seen in Limbo only memory? The laughter she’d heard in her bedroom a hallucination, a flashback? Or had she, like Jean, taken in some aspect of _self_ from her ex-friend (ex-lover), never to be completely absorbed? “It’s circular,” she said slowly. “If memory is the only thing he records of us, then memory is all we are, then memory is self, so self is what he records.”

Kurt smiled ruefully at her. “I admit in some areas of our new theology I have given up.”

Emma shook her head. “No,” she said. “This was helpful. Thank you.”

Kurt nodded, then hesitated. "May I be blunt?"

"I prefer it," said Emma.

"I think this is the most enjoyable conversation I have ever had with you," Kurt said, "because I think it is the first time you have come to me and told me directly what you wished to know.”

"Noted," said Emma, and then, "and completely unacceptable, of course. Next time you see me I'll be sure to be manipulating you for nefarious ends again."

"Thank you," said Kurt solemnly.

Emma almost said, _would it help to know that half my reason for doing this is the selfish desire to see Jean_ be Jean _again, to just get a drink and snipe with her and—if we're being really honest here, Mr. Wagner, if we're in confession, I would love the opportunity to touch her body and know it's her inside it?_

But Kurt was already gone, a puff of sulfurous smoke in his wake.

Her next stop was to speak to Doug, meeting him in his seat—more and more like a throne—at the base of Krakoa’s enormous face, and then she called on the rest of the Council.

It was a surprisingly quick vote. Kurt backed her up immediately, for which she was gratified—perhaps he’d guessed at the impetus behind her questions—and Selene added a cool note of approval, too. Sinister seemed almost gleeful, which was worrying, but the consequences of this—like the consequences of so many of their actions these days, individually and collectively—would have to be dealt with as they arose. It was enough for Emma, now, that Charles agreed not only that he could carry out her request, but that he would; Erik a silent but not necessarily disapproving spectre at his side, their arms nearly brushing, close as thought.

+

Jean ran a hand over the door to the cabin in front of her. Something was happening to it, something she didn’t quite understand. Beneath her simulated touch the wood seemed to shrink, the color leeching from it, like it was ageing sixty years in the space of seconds, and then swell, budding, green worms of new growth slipping out from between the boards. The air around her smelled sharp with surprise, and then the cabin exploded.

The last thing Jean felt before the world went black was the sudden crushing certainty that she was absolutely alone.

+

On the eastern shore of Krakoa, up past the Oracle where Mystique skulked, planning whatever she planned, the mountains rose high enough that, with a little encouragement from Ororo, they were capped in snow. 

Krakoa’s flower deposited Madelyne and Emma just below the base of the peak. Madelyne was standing firmer now, swathed in one of Emma’s fur coats—either she’d decided against creating her own gear for fear of making use of her magic and causing a relapse, or she’d seen it for the opportunity it was to accept quite a magnanimous gift; either way Emma couldn’t blame her. The last bottle of Limbo water was tucked into its pocket.

“What is this place?” Maddie asked, and then she turned, the wind shifting around her face to gently lower her hood, and saw the cabin.

It wasn’t exactly like the one in her mind. Emma wasn’t certain how any of Krakoa’s living architecture worked; she’d built the White Palace from the sweat of her brow and the little boost of having friends with every super-power in the world. But she’d fed her impressions of the place into Doug’s mind, and Doug had passed it on to his… partner, and this is what came out the other side.

The main structure of it was there—the square frame, the small porch, the chimney, the kitchen window. But instead of smoke rising from the chimney there was a curling tendril of grey-blue flowers, blooming upward from the multicolored, tumbled-together brick. The corners of the place weren’t jointed, but merged, the flat warm wood of the walls having grown sideways into position rather than being placed by other hands. And, perhaps most oddly, there was no door.

“It will open for you,” Emma said, “and anyone you designate a visitor.”

Madelyne turned to stare at her. 

“Jean will want to come and talk,” Emma said, though it was mostly a guess. She hesitated. “Scott, too, unless you want me to tell him not to. Maybe even Rachel.”

Maddie dropped her eyes. “Nathan…”

“Maybe,” said Emma quietly. “With time. He’s young.”

Maddie huffed a laugh. “I don’t really understand _why_ he’s young,” she admitted. “The impressions I got from Jean…”

Emma raised her shoulder in a shrug. “It’s a long story.” She watched Maddie glance at the cabin again, and then back at her. “I’d be happy to tell it sometime over dinner, if you’ll have me.”

“I—of course.” Maddie took a sideways step toward the cabin, as if drawn there by gravity. “Speaking of food—”

“The kitchen is fully stocked,” said Emma. “This—” she nudged the flower at her side with a toe, “—stays. Eventually you’ll have to come down and receive supplies from the rest of us, but I—we wanted to give you. A while to sort yourself out.”

“Thank you,” said Madelyne, her voice thick. “I—Thank you.”

Emma cocked her head. “Can you tell?”

Maddie didn’t ask what she meant. She stopped, the snow piling by her boots, and closed her eyes. Her hand slipped into the pocket of the coat, and Emma imagined her running her fingers over the curves of the diamond bottle. “Yes,” she said at last, and Emma couldn’t name the emotion in her voice or her mind at all. “Yes, she’s. Gone.”

For a moment she stood very still, the wind picking up around her, lifting her hair from her shoulders, like the whole mountain was breathing in with her. And then she raised a hiking-booted foot and stepped toward home.

Emma was about to turn away when Maddie paused, and turned back to her. “Emma.”

Emma raised her eyebrows. "Yes?"

Maddie approached quickly, a strange curl of wickedness to her mouth, and leaned in and kissed her. 

Emma took a shocked breath, but it was over before she could react in any other way; Maddie pulled away again, her cheeks pink with cold. "There," she said. "One last first thing I can take from her."

She walked away, leaving Emma in the snow, lips parted.

 _Emma,_ Scott said in her brain, making her jump, _something’s gone wrong._

Emma frowned, already striding back through the floral portal. _What is it?_

Scott’s mental voice was terse. _She’s not waking up._

+

Jean was sleeping.

It was odd, to be sleeping and aware of it, but she knew what this was. She’d suffered sleep paralysis on and off for a few years after her first resurrection, her mind still caught under the crushing dark water of the New York Harbor, dormant, while the Phoenix Force stole her image and went mad in her name. It was a pesky thing; no amount of telepathic training or control could quite free her when she was the one capturing herself, but it didn’t surprise her that it was happening again now, after.

After.

After what? She couldn’t quite put together where or when she was. She’d—died, again; but it felt abstracted. The pain of it was fresh and faded at once, like slightly too-old perfume. Logan—had he killed her? No, that wasn’t right, there was a peace associated with that name, a kind of joyful truce. A sharing.

Sharing with who? Sharing what?

She couldn’t _think,_ the weight of water crushing her down, and down, and down, her lungs thudding like they were being struck with a meat tenderizer, reducing her to dust, to dirt, to sludge at the bottom of the bay. It was so much _work,_ to breathe, to remember, to be. Why would she try?

Suddenly a hand closed on her wrist. Suddenly she had a wrist, suddenly she was more than just a pair of lungs and a personhood slowly fading, and she was being pulled, up, up, up through rushing water and into clear, cool sunlight.

Emma Frost shoved her bodily onto the rocks at the edge of Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, rolling her onto her side while Jean, half-blind, coughed river-water onto the stone. When she could see again she scrambled back from her, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“You pulled me out,” she said. “No, this—this isn’t how it was, it wasn’t you, it was—Dr. Richards, the Fantastic Four, and I was in some kind of, of. Coffin, casket.” She stared at Emma, feeling accusatory. “You shouldn’t even like me yet.”

Emma smirked at her. “Well, at least you know that much.” She tucked a lock of her long, golden hair behind her ear. “We’re not when you think we are, darling.”

Jean scrubbed a hand across her face. “Then—when—” Images split her mind. Emma, shattered on the floor in front of her, her own rage stark in her mind, but it felt different, brighter, less dark, more. Singular. Scott on their wedding day, her mind filled only with joy, of course only with joy, what else could there be? The first time Cable, face older than hers by decades, called her _mom,_ and it felt like an honor, not like a loss.

She shook herself. “Krakoa.”

Emma gave her a nod. “So…” She gestured around them with a gloved hand, perfectly clean, though she must have—she must have.

Jean looked past her at the young couples walking on the promenade, the groups of teenagers roller-skating on the Pier, and then slowly back to her waiting, perfectly-made up face. “This isn’t real.”

“Correct,” said Emma. “We’re in your mind. Still, for some reason.”

Jean licked her lips. She winced at the taste, but couldn’t quite manage to wish it away. “What happened with Madelyne?”

Emma settled into a more comfortable, cross-legged position. “We did what you wanted all along,” she said. “We gave her your body. And then we made you a new one.”

Jean blinked at her. “Two of me. Of my—of this body."

“Why not?” Emma asked. “You really thought Madelyne would be content with one run at having a real life? Especially when all you could offer her was _yours?_ You know her better.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “So do I, now.”

Jean rolled her head on her neck, trying to think about what it would even feel like to see Madelyne again in the flesh. Her flesh, but not anymore. Their flesh.

“It was this or go through this power struggle every time you died, and somehow I didn’t see you not dying any time soon,” Emma continued. She sighed. “You _should_ have just snapped back into the new clone body as soon as Charles plopped your—memory, soul, self, whatever, into it, but for some reason you’re comatose.”

“So here you are,” Jean said, too tired to remove the vague resentment from her tone. “To find out why.”

Emma raised her eyebrows at her, her face going a little colder. “Is that a problem?”

Jean sighed, turning her face up to the sun. There was no warmth to be found there, now that her mind couldn’t trick her into expecting any. “Why do you care, Emma?” She asked. “Because Scott asked you to? Because we’re all a big happy family now?”

Emma was silent for a prolonged moment, and then she said, “Maddie offered me something, the first time we spoke. She asked if I wanted to know what you thought of me.”

Jean felt—nothing. There should have been something, in reaction to that; anger at the proffered invasion of privacy, nervousness that Emma would find out about the joy she took in their weekly drinks, the moments of—she was woman enough to admit to it as lust, less comfortable with the more apt description of _longing,_ when Emma wasn’t looking at her. She doubted Emma was really ever unaware of being observed, but there was something about her in her less-guarded moments that took Jean’s breath away, a lapse in armor, or perhaps a trust sufficient enough to disrobe.

But all of that seemed so far away. Caught beyond the glass dome of the sky, belonging to some other being, one she wasn’t sure she really… was, right now.

“I turned her down,” Emma said, and Jean looked at her. She’d pulled her hair back from her face, gathering it in a low ponytail against her neck. Probably without even using her hands, in a place like this. “But maybe you’d like to know what I think of you.”

“I know what you think of me,” Jean said, rueful. “You’re not a subtle woman, Ms. Frost. _Self-righteous_ would probably be the first descriptor, no?”

Emma smiled at her, slow and almost soft, and there was maybe a crack in the sky, maybe a single in-drawn nervous breath that belonged here, to this Jean. “No,” said Emma. “It’s on the list, sure, but not first.”

“Okay,” said Jean, her hands twisting in her lap, “so—”

“True,” said Emma. “I think, is the best way to phrase it. I’ve been considering it for a while now, trying to find the correct language, and I think it’s _true._ Not _honest,_ though you’re generally pretty honest as well; it’s not about not telling lies, or not holding back. It’s just about—not being anything else than what you are, and the strength and kindness and heart that comes wrapped up in that.” She smiled, again, and another hairline fracture appeared in the glass of Jean’s mind. “That truth changed my life. _You_ changed my life, in ways I neither expected nor wanted, but—” she shook her head. “I have never been grateful to anyone the way I am grateful to you.”

It felt like an echo. _Don’t you dare thank me for sleeping with your husband._ Jean licked her lips, curled in on herself, and willed the walls keeping her here to shatter, willed herself to wake up, to respond to Emma in the real world where anything could _matter._

They held, unyielding.

Emma ducked her head, embarrassed, maybe, at Jean’s silence. She took a breath. “Also—”

“Stop,” said Jean, her fists curling against the stone at her side. “Please.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma said, sounding startled, “I—”

Jean shook her head. “I just—I can’t sit here and listen to you talk to me about who I am,” she said, “about how _true_ I am to myself, when.” She worked her tongue around in her mouth, still tasting silt. “Half of what I’ve been for years is gone,” she said. “And the rest of me, it’s—maybe I was a person, once, before all this, when I was still in the body I was born as, when I had a mother and a father and a sister, before. Before I turned ten years old and the world crashed in between my ears and Professor X took a piece of me away for the very first time.” 

Emma made a small, pained noise. “Ten? Maddie said—”

“He wouldn’t recruit me until later. At ten he,” Jean’s voice caught. “He sealed away my powers. Not my telekinesis, which developed slower, easier for me to control, but my telepathy. I didn’t get it back until after—” she gestured at the Manhattan skyline, crystallized in time. “Now. Here.”

“Why wait so long?” Emma asked.

Jean huffed a laugh, feeling no touch of humor. “I didn’t know,” she said. “He erased the knowledge of his visit, the memory of hearing the whole world yell. From me, from my parents.” She picked at the stone. “For a long time, I was grateful for that. You can—well. You don’t have to imagine why.”

“No,” said Emma quietly. “I don’t. But—”

“But?” Jean asked, raising her head to look at her.

Emma’s eyes were hard. “If I didn’t think it would get me instantly eviscerated by my own jewelry, I’d punch him in the jaw for it.”

Something in Jean bubbled up to her surface, and she smiled. “You could do it in diamond form,” she suggested. “Packs a harder punch, too.”

“Ah yes, then I’d just get slightly less instantly eviscerated, whenever I decided I wanted to feel sensations again.” Emma sighed theatrically. “Ever under threat because of my sensualist nature.”

“I appreciate the thought,” Jean said, and then, more accurately, “I appreciate the anger.”

Emma nodded at her.

"Have you ever been through the Siege Perilous?" Jean asked. She gathered her hair in one hand, piled it loosely, fruitlessly atop her head, wringing it out. River-water streamed down the nape of her neck.

Emma shook her head. If she was surprised at the topic shift, she didn’t show it.

"Neither have I," said Jean, letting her hair fall again. It swung wetly around her face. She didn’t bother to tell it to dry. "It's supposed to show you a different life. A happy life. Make you what you _could_ be, if you hadn't been marked for peril and strife the moment you drew breath."

Emma made a face. “I was marked for privilege and power, thank you, and I chose peril and strife. Over and over.” She shifted her jaw, muttering, “the only changing factor was why.”

Jean almost laughed at the sheer stubborn _Emma_ of that, but kept going. "I've thought myself through it so many times. Built it in my mind, crafting my own Australia, my own sunny bluff. But every time I step through…” her lips moved with no relation to the feeling of a smile. “There’s nothing at all.”

She turned her hands upward in her lap, empty.

After a moment Emma reached for them, curling her fingers against her palms until Jean reflectively curled hers back. Emma’s gloves were gone, and her skin was warm. “No one ever stays, right?”

Jean blinked at her. “What?”

Emma didn’t look at her, her gaze on their linked fingers. “Beyond the gate, in their new life. They always remember. They always come back.” 

“I guess?” said Jean. “I don’t—”

“I told young Cable recently that what-ifs are always compelling,” said Emma. “Because they are. We know that more than most, and I think Krakoa is presenting us both with ways to revisit choices we’ve made, not to undo them, but to make amends.”

She gave Jean an image, offering it up like a gift, of a cabin on a mountainside. For a moment of vertigo Jean thought it was the strange cage she’d occupied for—god, had it only been days?—but the shape of the mountain was wrong, the cabin itself subtly off, and sitting on the porch, playing a fast-paced, impeccable game of chess with herself, was Madelyne Pryor.

“But ultimately,” Emma continued, “what-ifs also meaningless. We are each of us a series of reactions and choices and choices to react, and at every moment we could have reacted differently, made a different choice. Of course we could have. And, somewhere, we did. Maybe we’ll even meet emissaries of that somewhere, one day. But those emissaries are not us, and they shouldn’t be us, because there is no such thing as what we _should_ be.”

Jean licked her lips. “You’re saying this was fate,” she said.

“No,” said Emma, voice fierce, and she met Jean’s eyes. ”I don’t believe in fate. I believe in reality. We’re here.” Her hands tightened on Jean’s. “ _We’re_ here. There’s no point in telling me you’re not a person, because a person is who I’m speaking with. A person I know. A person I love, Jean Grey. And if that person is smaller than she was yesterday, or changed, or new, then so be it. I welcome that newness, that change, because we are here, and here is the only place we can _build_.”

Jean stared at her. Somewhere in the city, a bell rang, once, like a fingernail flicked against a wineglass.

Emma’s eyes shifted over her face, searching. “Build with me,” she said, demanding and vulnerable at once. “I know you want that. I know you believe there’s something here, in this grand project, in what we stand for, in what we _are._ Take it. Want it, damn you, and then _take it._ ”

“Yes,” said Jean, _yes,_ and lunged forward to capture her mouth.

Around her, the sky shattered.

The grey shores of the harbor melted away into lush greenery, the smell of verdant plant life filling Jean’s nose as they kept kissing, one of Emma’s hands coming up to tangle in her hair. Someone whistled, low, and Jean heard someone she was pretty sure was Hank say, “Oh, my.”

Jean started pulling back, but Emma said, just between them, _No,_ slipped across a newly constructed bridge, neither in Jean’s mind nor her own, _let’s give them a show,_ and licked into her mouth. Jean rolled her eyes but obliged, pushing off the ground with her telekinesis so they rose into the air, the amber sap she’d been reborn in stretching and finally falling away as they rose and rose above the treetops.

When Emma finally let her go they were brushing shoulders with clouds. Jean was breathing hard, her new body still thrumming with recent creation, and the slow brush of Emma’s fingers down the curve of her side wasn’t helping. Emma blinked at her, dark-eyed, and then blinked again, looking her up and down, her throat working.

Jean laughed at her, her cheeks heating. “Did you forget I’d be naked?”

Emma coughed. “We could get you some clothes—”

Jean shrugged, turning it into a whole body affair, drifting closer again to press herself against Emma and wind her hands into her hair. “Or,” she suggested, “we could get started on all those favors I owe you.”

Emma’s hands settled on the small of her back, then slid down to cup her ass and—despite the fact that Jean was currently the one suspending them hundreds of feet above the forest floor—pick her up. “Did I mention _brilliant_ was in my list of descriptors for you? Because it certainly is now.”

Jean hummed, nuzzling the skin behind her ear and propelling them toward the nearest floral gate. “Before or after self-righteous?”

“Depends,” said Emma, and Jean would never have dared to call the note in her voice _fond_ except that _fond_ was the feeling she sent along with it, a little mental bubble of wondering affection. “How good are these favors?”

+

“Thank you,” said Emma. “I would have asked Jean—I _will_ ask Jean, for the next part. But.”

Maddie stuck her shovel into the dirt next to the grave. “But stealing corpses seemed more my speed?”

Emma smirked at her. “I know you don’t technically have prior—ha—experience, but I _remember_ you having prior experience, and it’s a hard first impression to shake.”

Maddie rolled her eyes. “So who was this woman?”

Emma hesitated. _She’s my you,_ she almost said, but it didn’t quite fit. “I hardly ever admit to being wrong,” she said instead. “But this one I think I can finally set right.”

She reached out, gentle, and brushed her fingers over the inscription on the gravestone. _Astrid Bloom,_ it read. _Taken from us too soon._

“Well,” Emma murmured. “We’ll see about that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, all.


End file.
